When Religion Teaches You Not to Recognise Abuse

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I would like to begin by acknowledging.

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The traditional custodians of the land on which I live and work, the Gundagara land and people. I pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging, and extend that.

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Respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

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I also want to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands on which you, our listeners, are joining us from today.

I recognize the deep connection that first nations people have to this land, their enduring culture and their commitment to the preservation and care for their country. This land was never ceded and it always was and always will be Aboriginal land. Welcome to beyond the Surface.

This is a space for conversations that sit at the edges of faith, identity, power and recovery, especially for those of us who have been shaped so stretched or harmed by fundamental religion or high control systems. Some episodes are personal, some are reflective, some are educational or curious or quietly disruptive.

All of them are grounded in lived experience and a deep respect for the complexity of leaving, questioning and rebuilding meaning. We will be talking about religious trauma, various forms of abuse, cult dynamics, queerness and recovery.

Non unique answers, but in honest conversations. In listening to these conversations, some parts might be heavy or activating for you.

Please take care of yourself while listening and feel free to pause or step away if you need to. I'm Sam and I'm really glad that.

Sam: 00:01:42

You're here with us.

Hey everyone, Just me today and I want to start with a question, but I'm not going to answer the question straight away because this episode is important and I want to let that question just sit for a minute because I think it deserves that.

What if the reason so many women couldn't see the abuse in their marriages, couldn't name it, leave it, sometimes they can't even see it as wrong or feel it as wrong, is because the very environment teaching them what love was supposed to look like was running the exact same playbook. What if it wasn't just him? What if it was never just him? Just pause. Let that sit for a bit. And here's what this episode is going to do.

We're going to talk about domestic violence and coercive control. We're going to talk about high control, religious environments, cultic dynamics, submission doctrine, and the theology of male headship.

And we're going to talk about what happens when those two things aren't separate topics, when they're actually the same story just told from two different registers but lived in the same one body. I want to say up front, this episode might be confronting for some of you, not in a gratuitous kind of way, but in a real way.

If you are currently in an unsafe situation, please make sure that you are in a space where you can listen to this privately and that you have access to support.

I will put some resources in the show notes around domestic violence services and also the practitioners over at the Religious Trauma Collective as well as my own practice.

But I want you to know that before we begin, just as a genuine request to please make sure that you are safe when listening to this episode and as a content note, we are going to talk about physical, emotional and spiritual abuse, coercive control, child abuse and religious manipulation. So if any of that is really live for you right now, please take care of yourself first and foremost.

Now just a little bit about why I guess I'm talking about this. It's being released in Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

But also I'm a therapist who works specifically with people recovering from religious trauma, spiritual abuse and high control belief systems. And so a significant portion of my clients are women. And over and over again I watched the same things come into my workplace.

The same two things that look like separate problems but actually are completely entangled. The religious system that they've survived and the relationship that they have survived within it.

And what I notice is that the two fields that exist to help them, the domestic violence sector and the religious trauma space, are largely operating in separate silos. They're potentially talking different languages. They're missing each other's peace. I've also lived inside high control religion.

Many of you who have listened to this podcast know that already.

And I know what it is like to have the absence of a healthy father figure exploit exploited by a community that is more than willing to position itself and a Father God as the replacement. I know what it is like to have your loyalty, your belonging, your entire sense of spiritual safety made contingent on deference.

That's not abstract for me, it's in my history and it shapes why I think this conversation is one of the most important and under named in this space. So let's do this. She might be a long one.

I'm flagging that now and I'm not going to make any apology for it because I think this topic has been crammed into too smaller containers for far too long. And so grab a cuppa, make yourself comfy. We're going to get into it.

So the coercive control framework changed everything about how we understand domestic violence. And I mean that genuinely. Before it became central to how the DV sector thought and talked about abuse, the dominant Model was incident based?

Did he hit her? How many times? Were there witnesses? Was she hospitalised?

That was the framework was visible physical, episodic violence as the measure of whether the abuse. Abuse was real. And what that model missed catastrophically was the vast majority of abuse.

Because the hitting, when or if that happens, is often the end point of a long methodical process of dismantling a person, of shrinking her world, of replacing her sense of reality with his, of making her so dependent, so isolated, so uncertain of her own perceptions, and that by the time the physical violence occurs, she is often no longer sure whether she's allowed to call it that.

The coercive control framework named the pattern instead of the incident, the erosion of autonomy, the monitoring of movements, finances, social connections, the gaslighting and the isolation, and the way an abuser systematically removes every resource and reference point a person has until the only map of reality is the one he's drawn. That shift was genuinely important.

It has saved lives, it changed legislation, it gave language to people who had been trying to explain something that didn't have bruises and weren't being believed. But here is where the standard framework runs into its limit. Because it was built around a dyadic two people, one abuser, one victim.

The control flows between them, from one to the other.

And that model, as important as it is, doesn't account for what happens when the control is not just interpersonal, but structural, communal, illogically authorized. What happens when it is not just coming from a partner, but from an entire community, from a leadership structure, from God.

I want to introduce an idea here that I think is essential for understanding what we're talking about today.

And I want to do it without making it academic, because it's not an academic idea, it's a lived one, which is the idea of group based, coercive control. Now, that has been widely spoken about since the Victorian Parliamentary inquiry, which has been incredible.

And the beyond belief statement put together an incredible framework around this. So please go and check that out, if you haven't already, but I want to talk about it in a very specific context.

So when a woman is in a high control religious environment, whether that's a fundamentalist church, occultic community, a high demand religious movement, the coercive control is not just coming from her husband, it is ambient, it is structural, it comes from the theology, from the leadership, from the other members of the community, from the women in her small group, from the God she has been taught to understand in a very specific way. The control is in the air, it comes from Every direction simultaneously and crucially, it has divine authority behind it.

Think about what that means just for a moment. Because in a standard coercive control situation, an abuser has to work to convince his partner that he is right and her perceptions are wrong.

He has to invest effort into the gaslighting, into the isolation in the reality distortion. In a high control religious environment, the system does that work for him.

The theology has already told her that female authority is suspect, that her instincts are her sin nature, that submission is godly and resistance is rebellion. He doesn't have to build the cage, he just has to move into one that's already been constructed. I heard an analogy once that I keep coming back to.

Imagine trying to identify that your house is on fire when everyone around you is also standing in the flames and calling it warmth. That's what we're talking about. Not just one person telling you that your reality is wrong.

It's an entire community, an entire cosmos telling you that this is just what love looks like. There's one more piece of the coercive control framework that the standard model doesn't fully capture, and it's what I'd call the sideways control.

Now, again, not an academic term. This is my term. In a high control religious community, the control doesn't just flow downward from leaders to members, from husband to wife.

It flows sideways too. Members police each other. Women hold each other accountable to submission.

Congregation members report concerns back to leadership, the people or the person enforcing the control is often not the person who designed it. A woman's closest friend in the congregation might be the one reminding her that a good wife doesn't speak to her husband that way.

Her accountability partner might be the one gently suggesting that her unhappiness is a sign she needs to submit more fully. The diffusion of control across a whole community is not incidental. It's what makes the system so total and so hard to see from inside it.

This is the foundation we're working from. So keep that in mind as we continue to go throughout this.

So I want to start drawing the direct parallels, and not as a list, because that's boring, but as a conversation, because I think when you put these two things side by side, something clicks that should have clicked a long time ago. Let's start with isolation. In intimate partner violence, isolation is one of the earliest and most reliable warning signs.

An abusive partner systematically cuts his partner off from her support networks, her friends, family, colleagues. Sometimes this happens dramatically through conflict and ultimatums, but more often than not, it happens slowly.

He's Uncomfortable with her friendship with a particular person. Her family doesn't really understand their relationship, or spending time with people outside the relationship seems to make things harder.

And so gradually the circle closes. By the time it's fully closed, she's entirely dependent on him for her social world, her emotional support, her entire sense of reality.

Leaving feels unsurvivable because there is genuinely nowhere else to go. In a high control religious environment, isolation is structural. The outside world is spiritually dangerous. Non believers are a corrupting influence.

Secular friendships pull you away from God. Your most meaningful, your most important relationships should remain within that community.

And if you do have friends or family outside of the church, well, they don't really understand your faith, do they? They'll never quite be able to support you the way that your brothers and sisters in Christ can.

The mechanism is completely different, the outcome almost identical. The person becomes entirely dependent on the system for their social world, their emotional support, their sense of belonging.

Leaving feels unsurvivable because it genuinely does feel unsurvivable in the way that she's been taught to understand survival. Now I want to talk about monitoring and surveillance.

In coercive control situations, this looks like checking phones, demanding to know whereabouts at all times, showing up unexpectedly, keeping track of mileage, maybe demanding access to email accounts.

The abuser constructs a surveillance system, sometimes explicit, often subtle, but ultimately it ensures that the partner has no private space, no movement that isn't accounted for, no relationship that isn't monitored.

And in high control religious environments, this looks like accountability, partnerships, confession, pastoral check ins, the theology of transparency. The idea that the spiritual healthy Christian is an open book, hiding nothing. Because what do you have to hide if you're walking in the light?

The expectation that you bring your struggles, your doubts, your temptations to the leadership for guidance and correction. The accountability group where you report on your inner life, sometimes on a weekly basis.

This is, this is surveillance dressed up in sanctification language.

And it is remarkably effective because unlike an abusive partner, surveillance, which can be recognized as controlling the religious version, that's framed as care, as discipleship, as the community helping you become the person God intends you to be.

The fact that you have no private inner life, no thought or feeling that isn't subject to the community's scrutiny, well, that's just presented as spiritual health, not as a profound violation. Then there's the reality distortion and gaslighting in an abusive relationship.

Gaslighting is the systematic undermining of a person's confidence in their own perceptions. You're too sensitive. You're imagining things that didn't happen the way that you remember it. I never said that. You're the problem here.

Done consistently over time, this erodes a person's ability to trust their own experience. They stop relying on their own perceptions and they start relying on his instead.

Because their perceptions keep being wrong and his keeping right, and they can't find solid ground anywhere else. And so if we move that over again into a high control religious environment, reality distortion is spiritual authority.

Because when a leader tells you that your doubts are a spiritual attack, your discomfort is your sin, nature resisting God, your anger is pride and rebellion. Perceptions about something being wrong are evidence of how far you have drifted.

They are doing the exact same thing an abusive partner does when he tells you you're too sensitive. The mechanism, again, is identical.

The vocabulary is theological, and the theological version is arguably more devastating, because it doesn't just tell you that your perceptions are wrong. It tells you that God agrees. Love bombing, an intermittent reinforcement.

For anyone who has been in a coercive, controlling situation knows this cycle. The intensity of the early relationship, the way he made you feel seen and chosen and special in a way that nobody else had.

The warmth, the attention, and then gradually the withdrawal, the way affection became conditional, the unpredictability of his warmth. Sometimes you got it and you never quite knew what you'd done to earn it. And when it was withdrawn, you worked desperately to get it back.

That cycle, warmth and withdrawal, celebration, shame, belonging and exclusion is also the fundamental operating mechanism of high control religious communities. You are celebrated with when you conform, you are spiritually shamed when you don't. You belong fully when you are performing the faith correctly.

You are prayed over with concern, spoken to gently about your drift, about whether everything is okay spiritually, which is in itself a form of warning when you are not. And that unpredictability is not accidental. It is regulating in the worst possible way.

It keeps people striving, complying, monitoring themselves constantly for any sign that they might be losing their standing. Now, a lot of people know that in intimate partner violence, financial control is a core mechanism of entrapment. He controls the money.

She has no access to accounts, no financial independence, no way to fund a departure. Sometimes she's been kept from working. Sometimes the finances are so entangled that disentangling them feels impossible.

In high control religious environments, financial control operates through tithing, as obligation, not invitation obligation, and through a community infrastructure that is often deeply entangled with a person's economic life. Their job might be within the church or a church Adjacent organisation. Their housing might be community provided or community proximate.

Their professional network, their clients, their references, all within the community. Leaving does not just mean losing your spiritual home.

It can mean losing your income, your housing, your entire economic support structure simultaneously. And finally, identity erosion is the last part I want to talk about in this section.

Both abusive relationships and high control religious environments do the same thing to a person's sense of self. They dismantle it systematically over time.

Your preferences, your opinions, your desires, your instincts, your sense of humor, your politics, your understanding of your own history, all of it gets gradually replaced by the system's version of who you should be. Your authentic self becomes a liability. Your compliance becomes your identity.

And by the time someone is deeply embedded in a relationship, in a community, or in both, they often have very little sense of who they are outside the framework that has been installed inside them. I want to name this parallel directly, without hedging it, because I think it needs to be said plainly. These are not coincidental similarities.

This is not a metaphor or an analogy being stretched too far.

These are the same tools of control, isolation, surveillance, reality distortion, intermittent reinforcement, financial entrapment, identity erosion, but deployed in different containers. One container is a marriage, one container a religious institution.

When a woman is inside both simultaneously, she is being subjected to these mechanisms from multiple directions at once, with each system reinforcing and justifying the other. That is what we're talking about. Okay, let's. It's pretty rare, but let's get into a little bit of theology.

I'm going to name it directly because I think it's important to be specific here, and vagueness is how stuff stays hidden.

So complementarianism is the theological position that men and women are equal in spiritual worth, but have different complementary roles, with male authority and female submission being divinely ordained.

The doctrine of male headship holds the husband in the spiritual head of the household with final authority over the family, in the same way that Christ is the head of the church. This teaching is grounded Primarily in Ephesians 5, the instruction that wives should submit to their husbands as to the Lord.

It is taught explicitly across a wide range of conservative Christian traditions. This is not fringe theology.

This is mainstream doctrine taught from pulpits and every Sunday across Australia, the United States, New Zealand, Canada, the United Kingdom and beyond. Millions of women are sitting in services right now being told in various ways that their submission to their husband is an act of obedience to God.

There are two books that I want to name specifically because they represent how this theology gets operational in daily life in ways that are genuinely dangerous.

Created to be his help Meet by Debbie Pearl this book, which has sold millions of copies and circulates widely in conservative Christian homeschooling and homemaking communities, instructs women to remain sexually available to their husbands regardless of their own feelings. It frames a wife's total deference as her highest spiritual calling.

It explicitly discourages women from seeking help outside the marriage for marital problems. It has been recommended in countless women's ministry contexts.

It is, to be direct about it, a manual for surviving abuse and calling it faithfulness.

The other book that I will talk about a little we'll come back to that is another book, also by Michael and Debbie Pearl, which is to train up a child, but we'll get to that one in a bit. I also want to name something pretty specific about a public position that is documented and needs to be on the record.

And whilst I'm not naming anyone because there's actually probably far too many people to name in this, but there are prominent complementarian teachers who have publicly stated that a woman in an abusive marriage should endure it for a season rather than separate, that she should continue to submit that leaving is a failure of faith. These are documented positions. They have documented consequences. Women have stayed in life threatening situations because the theology told them to.

Some of them did not survive. Those positions are what shaped the women sitting in those pews.

The positions are what got installed in their nervous system as the definition of what a good wife does. Now I want to talk about what this theology actually does to a person physiologically and psychologically over time.

Because when you are theologically instructed, from the time you enter a community or for second gen believers, from the time you could understand language that your role is to defer, to follow, to support, to not hold final authority over your own life, several things happen, and they happen slowly enough that you often don't even notice that they are happening.

Your capacity to identify your own needs as legitimate erodes because a framework that centers your husband's needs as primary and frames your needs as secondary to his spiritual leadership gradually teaches your nervous system that your needs are kind of not the point. Not through a single dramatic moment, but through 10,000 little recalibrations. You learn to frame your needs as requests, then as suggestions.

Then you stop naming them at all because it creates conflict. And conflict is evidence of your pride. Your instinct to push back against something wrong gets reframed as spiritual failure.

Every time you feel the natural human resistance to being controlled every time something in you says this isn't right. The theological framework is there to interpret that feeling as sin, as pride, or as your flesh nature resisting what God is asking of you.

You have been taught deeply and repeatedly to distrust your flesh nature, so you distrust the feeling. You pray against it, and you submit.

Your perception of what constitutes mistreatment gets recalibrated against a standard that has already told you that your comfort is secondary anyway. This is perhaps the most insidious thing. You are not just being told to stay in a situation that might be harmful.

You are being given a framework for understanding the situation that makes it nearly impossible to to assess whether it is harmful in the first place. The baseline has been moved.

What would register as mistreatment in a secular relationship gets absorbed into the category of the challenges of marriage, or my husband leading imperfectly, or the work of sanctification. I grew up in a context where the absence of a healthy father figure was something that the Church was very willing to step into.

And I've thought a lot about what that meant, the way Father, God and the church as family became replacements that replicate the same structural dynamics. You learn to receive authority from a spiritual father. You learn that love and correction come from the same source.

You learn that the appropriate response to that authority is trust, deference and gratitude, not question. When I was inside it, I understood that framework as love.

Looking at it now, I understand it as a template, and I see it replicated in the marriages of so many of the women I have spoken to.

Now I want to talk about what submission, what the submission doctrine does specifically, particularly in an actively abusive marriage, because it doesn't just fail to protect women. That would be bad enough, but it actively creates the conditions for abuse to thrive.

It tells a woman that her husband's authority is God ordained, which means that his exercise of that authority, even when it is harmful, even when it is cruel or when it is terrifying, create carries divine sanction. Resistance is not just marital conflict. It's spiritual rebellion. It puts her in the position of choosing between her own safety and her God.

And the theology has already told her which one to choose. It tells her that a husband who is failing to lead well is her responsibility to support and uplift through greater submission.

Not a sign that something is wrong, not evidence that the marriage is unsafe. A spiritual challenge for her to rise to through prayer, through patience and deeper compliance.

The burden of a marriage's failure is placed almost entirely on the woman's response to her husband's behaviour, not on the behaviour itself. It gives an abuser a weapon. Scripture is a weapon in the hands of someone who has been told.

It grants him authority over his wife's body, her movements, her finances, her spiritual life. And he doesn't have to deploy it alone. The theology backs him up. The pastor backs him up. The community might even back him up.

He has God on his side and the people of God on his side, and the word of God on his side. She has her own perception, which the framework has already told her is suspect.

And then there's the pastoral counseling problem, which flows directly from all of this. When a woman in these communities go to their pastor or elder about what is happening in their marriage, what are they often told?

Pray more, submit more. Consider what you might be doing that makes it harder for your husband to lead. Have you been keeping yourself up for him? Are you meeting his needs?

Is there bitterness in your heart that might be contributing to the conflict? Now, I want to be clear. This is not a rare pastoral response. I know it might sound like one, but. But it's not. It is a structural one.

It flows directly and logically from the theology.

A pastor who genuinely believes that male headship is divinely ordained and that a wife's role is to support her husband's leadership cannot consistently tell a woman that her husband is wrong and that she should lead. That would contradict everything that theology says. So the pastoral response is not just a pastoral failure.

It is the theology working exactly as intended. There's also the question of what happens when a woman discloses to a pastor and the pastor does respond with some degree of concern.

Even in those cases, even when a pastor is genuinely alarmed by what he's hearing, the response is still typically to work on the marriage. Couples counselling within the church, mentoring from a senior couple, a season of accountability and prayer with the husband.

The goal is restoration of the marriage, not the safety of the woman. Because the theology frames an intact marriage as the goal.

And a theology that frames an intact marriage as the goal cannot center a woman's safety when her safety and the marriage's preservation are in conflict. That is what makes it so dangerous. It's not broken, it's functioning. So here is what I'm saying.

If a church operating under complementarian or high control theology were to provide its women with a thorough, honest, evidence based education in coercive and intimate partner violence, the kind that DV advocates and trained practitioners would recognise as genuinely useful, those women would not just start recognizing dynamics in their marriages, they would start recognizing them in the church itself.

Now, I want to walk through why and We've just spent a decent chunk of time naming the features of coercive control and we've named the features in high control religious environments as well. The overlap is not partial, it's almost total.

A genuinely useful DV education would teach women that isolation from external support networks is a warning sign.

But high control churches require this exact isolation, framing it as spiritual protection, as the natural preference of a person whose primary community is their faith family.

A church that taught women to recognize isolation as a coercive control tactic would be teaching them to recognise something that the church itself is doing.

A genuinely useful DV education would teach women that surveillance, the monitoring of movements, thoughts, relationships, finances, is a mechanism of control. Except that high control churches use accountability structures, pastoral oversight and the theology of transparency to do exactly this.

So teach women to recognise surveillance as abuse and util. Teach them to look at their accountability partnership very differently.

A genuinely useful DV education would teach women that when someone in authority over you tells you consistently that your perceptions are wrong, your feelings are unreliable, your instincts are the problem, that that's gaslighting, it is reality distortion, it is abuse. But high control theology requires spiritual authority to function. It requires leaders to be trusted over a woman's own perception.

It requires her doubts to be understood as spiritual attack rather than a legitimate question. Teach women that this is gaslighting and you hand them a lens through which the authority structure of the church becomes unrecognisable to itself.

A genuinely useful DV education would teach women that intermittent reinforcement, unpredictable cycles of warmth and withdrawal, belonging and shame is a mechanism that creates trauma, bonding, that is not love, that is control. But this is the operating mechanism of community belonging. In high control, religion in out celebrated, concerned over, welcomed back.

The cycle of belonging and shame is not a bug, it's how the community maintains compliance. Do you recognise what I'm saying here?

Teaching women to recognise coercive control would require the church to hand them a tool that if used honestly, would illuminate the church itself as an agent of coercive control.

And that is something the system cannot survive doing, not because the people in it are sitting in a back room calculating this, but because the structure is self preserving, every system is.

And a system built on the requirement of submission and deference cannot simultaneously hand its members the tools to identify submission and deference as vectors of harm without contradicting itself at a structural level. Let me be specific about what would have to be true for genuine DV education to happen in these spaces.

Women would need to be told that Their instincts are trustworthy. That is in direct contradiction to a theology that tells them their instincts are sin nature.

Women would need to be told that their discomfort is data that when something feels wrong, that feeling is worth taking seriously. That is a direct contradiction to a theology that tells them their discomfort is pride, rebellion, or.

Or the spiritual attack of an enemy who wants them to doubt their calling.

Women would need to be told that authority figures, including husbands and pastors, can be wrong and can cause harm without ceasing to be authority figures. That is in direct contradiction to a theology that grounds authority in divine appointment rather than human accountability.

Women would need to be told that leaving a harmful situation is not spiritual failure. That is in direct contradiction to a theology of marital permanence that frames commitment as faithfulness and departure as faithlessness.

Every single thing a genuine DV education would need to give these women is in direct tension with the framework the community requires to function. Which brings me to the point that I think is the most important thing I'm probably going to say in this episode.

The church's failure to protect women from domestic abuse is not primarily a failure of compassion. It is not primarily a failure of awareness. It is not that pastors don't care or that congregations are full of bad people. Most of them are not.

Many of them are good people who genuinely believe they are doing the right by the women in front of them. The failure is structural.

It is a feature of a theology that was never designed to prioritise women's safety, especially over institutional and marital preservation. The theology does not allow it. And where the theology is the water, asking the water to recognize itself as wet is asking a very great deal.

I think it matters for how we hold the people inside these communities to consider that not as villains, but as people shaped by a structure that serves them, that serves something other than their flourishing. That doesn't make the harm less real, but it does change what accountability looks like.

And it changes what genuine change and reform would have to require. It would require dismantling the theology that creates the conditions, not reforming the pastoral response, though that needs to change too.

Not adding DV awareness modules to women's ministry, not training pastors to give better referrals, though that would help at the margins. But the theology, the actual doctrinal content that tells women their role is submission and their instinct, are suspect. That's a much harder ask.

And it's why genuine change, I think, in these spaces feel so rare. And I want to anticipate a response that I know some people will have here, because I've heard it, and it deserves a direct answer.

And the response is going to sound like. But not all complementarian churches enable abuse. Not all pastors will tell women to stay.

There are men in these traditions who are gentle and safe and would never use their authority to harm. And that is true. I am not saying that every complementarian husband is an abuser.

I'm not saying every pastor in these traditions is complicit in harm. What I am saying is that theology creates conditions.

It establishes a power structure that an abusive person can exploit with extraordinary ease and with theological backing that no one in the community is equipped to challenge. The gentle, safe, complementarian husband benefits from a theology that was not designed with him in mind.

It was designed with power in mind and in the hands of someone who will use power badly, which is something you cannot predict from the outside of a marriage. It is extraordinarily dangerous. The gentleness of some men inside this framework does not make the framework safe. It just makes it harder to see.

Okay, I want to shift gears for a moment because I want to sit with what it actually feels like to be a person living inside the thing that we've just been describing.

Because I think whilst the analytical framing, as necessary as it is, can make it feel distant, and this is not a distant reality, this is happening in bodies, in kitchens, in beds, in prayer meetings.

One of the most specific complexities of survivors who are navigating both religious trauma and domestic violence simultaneously is that the two things are almost never separable. The community is the support system for the marriage. The marriage is the thing the community exists to protect.

When you try to get help, the people you would naturally turn to are the people who are invested in the marriage's preservation.

Your closest friends in the congregation, your women's group leader, your pastor, the very people positioned as your support system are the people most likely to respond to your disclosure with encouragement, to return, to try harder, to pray more, to submit more. Which means there is often genuinely no safe disclosure space inside the system.

Nowhere, to be honest, nowhere to name what is happening without it being redirected back into compliance.

There's also a specific cognitive confusion of trying to assess whether what you have experienced was abuse when the framework you were given to evaluate your experiences was built by the system causing the harm.

Now, this is one of the things that I see most consistently, and I think it is the one of the things that is the hardest to name in a way that people outside this experience can fully grasp. If you have been told Your whole life, your whole adult life, or maybe your whole life. Full stop.

That a good wife submits that marital conflict is evidence of your sin nature, that your husband's failings are your spiritual challenge to rise to that your discomfort means you need to pray harder and trust more. Then your entire evaluative framework for your own experience has been shaped by the system causing the harm.

The gaslighting doesn't just come from him.

It comes from every sermon, every accountability conversation, every well meaning woman in your small group who says marriage is hard, but God brought you together for a reason. Every time you tried to articulate something wrong and couldn't find the words because the words you'd been given didn't include the words for this.

And then there's leaving, which in this context is rarely clean and almost never one thing. Leaving the marriage and leaving the church often happen together or can't be separated, but don't always move at the same pace.

Some women leave the marriage and try to stay in the church and find that the church aligned with the theology makes that impossible. The community wraps around the husband. She is prayed for with concern. She is encouraged to reconsider.

She is quietly and sometimes explicitly unwelcome as a separated or divorced woman in a space built around the intact family unit. The community she stayed in for the sake of her sanity becomes another place she has to leave. The losses compounded.

Some women leave the church and initially stay in the marriage. They begin to deconstruct. They start to see the framework and then they turn that lens on the marriage.

And what they see is, is the same thing under different lighting. And that realization is its own kind of shattering. Because it means that the marriage wasn't just a marriage.

It was a sight of the same control she thought she'd left behind when she left the pews. The grief of that recognition, of seeing clearly what you were inside, is one of the most specific and under named griefs in this whole landscape.

Some women leave everything at once. The husband, the community, the theology, the God, all of it in one terrible, necessary flood.

That kind of leaving is survivable, but it requires a level of internal resource that many women in these situations have had systematically depleted. It is a profound act of survival and it deserves to be named as one. And some women leave nothing. They stay.

They quiet the part of themselves that knows. They find ways to endure. And I say this without judgment and with a great deal of sorrow.

Because staying is often not a choice in any meaningful sense of the word. It is often the only option available when every exit has been closed and every instinct has been systematically untrained.

Each of those paths carry their own grief. The grief of losing the marriage, the grief of losing the community, which is real and complicated even when the community was causing harm.

The grief of losing faith, the grief of losing the self that believed in all of it. Those griefs don't come in a neat order. They're not linear.

They arrive in scrambled, unexpected sequences, often years after the physical departure, if there was one.

And they compound each other in ways that neither the domestic violence sector or the religious trauma space, operating separately, is currently equipped to hold. What I see and hear consistently for those navigating this intersection is is a particular kind of perceptual damage.

When you have been told from multiple directions and with divine backing that your perceptions are not to be trusted. The foundational capacity of recovery, which is the ability to trust your own assessment of what happened to you, is profoundly impaired.

You can know cognitively that something was wrong and still doubt it.

You can read every piece of literature about coercive control, recognise every pattern, name every tactic, and still, in a quiet moment, wonder whether you're being fair, whether you're exaggerating, whether God is disappointed in you for leaving. That is what living inside a framework that has colonized your perception does to a person.

And it is one of the most painstaking pieces of recovery work that I have ever seen. I don't want to skip over this next bit because I think it's one of the most undernamed parts of this conversation.

So when coercive control operates inside a religiously sanctioned marriage, children are not just witnesses. Their theology extends to them. The doctrine of parental authority, specifically paternal authority, is explicit.

In high control religious traditions, children's obedience is framed as spiritual virtue. Submission to parents, particularly to fathers, is the training ground for submission to God.

And physical discipline is, in many of these traditions, not just permitted, but prescribed.

Back to that book I mentioned earlier, to Train Up a Child by Michael and Debbie Pearl, is, and I want to be direct about what it recommends here, which is physical punishment beginning in infancy, switching of babies, systematic breaking of a child's will as a spiritual practice. This book is not obscure. It has been widely distributed in conservative Christian homeschooling circles for decades.

Children have died in situations where parents were applying its methods. It is a document of theological child abuse and it has been treated as parenting guidance.

Beyond the explicit abuse, and we have to name the explicit abuse, there is also what gets transmitted more quietly. Children who grow up watching A mother submit to a father who controls, belittles or harms her to not harms her.

Do not grow up neutral on the subject of love and power. They grow up with a very specific education. They learn that love and control coexist and are not distinguishable from each other.

They learn that male authority is natural and God given and is expressed through a woman's deference. They learn that a woman's distress is secondary to a man's needs. They learn that staying is faithfulness and leaving is failure.

They learn that the appropriate response to harm from someone who has authority over you is compliance and prayer, not resistance and exit. These are not lessons taught in a classroom.

They are absorbed, they live in the body and they travel into adult relationships with startling fidelity. Because the nervous system doesn't distinguish between learning and living. It just records what happens and uses it to predict what happens next.

Children who grow up in these environments are not broken. They are not damaged beyond repair.

They are people who learned a very specific set of lessons about how the world works in conditions where those lessons were the only ones on offer.

Recovery is possible, but it requires someone to first name what was learned, which requires a framework for understanding that it was a system and not just their reality.

There's a particular experience I want to spend a moment on and that's the experience of second gen survivors, people who were born into high control religious environments rather than being recruited as adults. This population has a specific complexity that often gets missed when we use the language of leaving.

Because they didn't get recruited, they were born inside the framework, was installed before they had any other reference point. There is no pre cult self to return to know who I was before, to reconstruct a path back towards.

When we talk about recovery, when we talk about recognising abuse, we have to hold the reality that for some people, the abuse was so total and so normalised from the beginning of their conscious lives that it genuinely did not register as anything other than their reality. The cage was the only world they'd ever known. Recognising it as a cage is not a small cognitive step.

It is an act of profound and disorienting reconstruction.

And for those of us who work with this population, this is the work, the slow, painstaking work of helping someone rebuild a reference point for reality that doesn't have the system at the centre of it.

I want to speak to the practitioners listening for a moment, just directly, but I want to deliver it in a plain language, because survivors deserve to hear this too. Survivors deserve to Understand what the system that are supposed to help them are and aren't set up to do.

The domestic violence sector has done and continues to do genuinely important work. Safety planning, crisis intervention, legal advocacy, refuges, the coercive control framework itself.

None of what I'm about to say is a dismissal of that work. It is just an honest accounting of the gap. The DV sector often operates from a secular framework.

And a secular framework, when applied to a survivor of religiously based coercive control, can miss some of the most critical dimensions of what she's navigating. Safety planning looks different when leaving doesn't mean just physical separation from a partner. It means spiritual annihilation.

It means losing your understanding of who God is, what your purpose is, whether you are good, whether you will be okay. Standard safety planning accounts for practical risk.

Housing, finances, children, legal protection, and all of that needs to be done immediately and first and foremost.

But it doesn't always account for the internal dimension of religious identity collapse, which can be as disorienting as any practical crisis, and which significantly affects a survivor's capacity to make and act on decisions. Risk assessment in DV contexts typically focuses on the individual abuser, his history, his access, his lethal indicators.

It doesn't always have a lens for the community as an extension of the abuser's control network.

But in high control religious context, the community can continue to monitor pressure and spiritually shame a woman long after she has physically left the marriage.

Ex husbands in these communities have access to pastoral networks, to mutual friends, to the woman's own family members, sometimes who may remain in the church. The congregation can function as surveillance and pressure that extends the reach of the original abuse indefinitely.

A risk assessment that doesn't account for this is missing a significant part of the risk and the theology itself.

The specific content of what the woman was taught, the specific ways that theology shaped her understanding of herself and her options, often isn't named as part of the abuse landscape.

Coercive control tools don't typically include a question about whether the abuser's tactics were divinely sanctioned by a shared religious framework. They should, though it would give you far more information about the person's experiences.

Now, the other side, the religious trauma space, which is my space and which I have enormous respect for, has its own gaps, though, when it comes to this intersection.

The religious trauma field has done vital work in naming spiritual abuse, in validating the experience of people who left high control religion, in creating frameworks for understanding the psychological impact of that harmful theology. And that work matters enormously.

But the religious trauma space can sometimes focus heavily on the intellectual and identity dimensions of deconstruction.

The theological unpacking, the grief of losing faith, the reconstruction of identity without giving adequate weight to the physical safety and legal dimensions that are present when DV is also in the picture.

Someone presenting in a religious trauma context might be describing their deconstruction, their loss of faith, their grief about leaving the community. And there is a live DV situation underneath that that hasn't been named yet because the frameworks for naming it aren't present.

The two populations aren't perfectly overlapping. Not everyone who has experienced religious trauma has also experienced intimate partner violence, but the overlap is substantial.

It is not a coincidence. It is a predictable consequence of theologies that create the conditions for both.

And so the two fields need to be talking to each other far more than they currently are.

What integrated support would actually look like is practitioners who understand both DV and the religious trauma dimensions and don't require survivors to choose between their healing contexts. Frameworks that account for spiritual coercion as a named dimension of intimate partner violence. Not a complicating factor.

A core feature safety planning that takes community based surveillance seriously as a risk factor. Legal advocacy that understands the specific dynamics of religiously informed financial control and social entrapment.

And a religious trauma space that routinely asks about safety, about the relationship, about what else is happening, not as an afterthought, but as a structural part of how we hold these stories. Because these stories are happening in the same body at the same time, in the same life, and they need to be held that way.

Okay, I want to start landing this episode somewhere that feels honest about how hard this is without being bleak about it. Because it's not bleak. Recovery from this intersection is real and it happens, and I've watched people do it.

But I also want to be honest about what it actually is. Because the tidy version isn't helpful. And do you deserve more than the tidy version?

Recovery, when DV and religious trauma are intertwined, is not linear. It doesn't start at the beginning and end at the end. It often doesn't start with a presenting issue.

Someone might come into therapeutic work talking about deconstruction, about losing their faith, about the grief of leaving their community. And the marriage sits quietly in the background for months or maybe years, until enough safety has been built that it can come forward.

That is not resistance or avoidance. That is the protective sequencing of a nervous system that knows what it can hold and when it deserves to be met as wisdom not push past.

Conversely, someone might come in with the marriage as the presenting issue, the separation, the legal process, the practical chaos of leaving, and take years to connect it to the broader theological system that created those very conditions. The marriage is the immediate, visible crisis. The religion is the water.

And the water is so pervasive, so fundamental to how they understand everything, that it often can't be examined until the acute crisis has stabilised enough to allow it.

There are specific recovery tasks in this intersection that don't show up cleanly in either the standard DV or the standard religious trauma framework. The first and foremost, the first and most foundational, is rebuilding the capacity to trust your own perceptions.

This has been systematically undermined from two directions, the partner and the framework, and rebuilding it is slow, patient work. It's not primarily cognitive.

You can understand intellectually that your perceptions are trustworthy, while your nervous system continues to doubt every observation you make. The cognitive understanding is the beginning, not the destination.

Another aspect is reconstructing an identity that doesn't have the marriage or the community at its centre. Both the relationship and the religion provided a very complete account of who you are, your role, your purpose, your value, your place in the world.

When both are gone, the question of who you are outside those frameworks can feel genuinely unanswerable. And the work of answering it is not a quick exercise in self discovery.

It is a gradual, sometimes painful excavation of preferences, instincts, desires and opinions that were never given space to exist. The third is learning to navigate authority without either automatic compliance or reflexive recoil.

Both coercive control and high control religion train people in a specific relationship to authority, deference, compliance and the suppression of dissent.

When someone has lived inside those dynamics, the experience of any authority, including a therapist, a support worker, a judge in a family law matter, can activate patterns that were installed for a very different purpose. The therapeutic relationship is not exempt from this. It has to be held very carefully. And there is grief, boy, there is a lot of it.

The grief of the marriage, not just its ending, but often the marriage as it was hoped to be, as it was believed to be, as the theology said it could be. The grief of the community, the belonging, the meaning, the relationships, even when those things were entangled with the harm.

Maybe the grief of faith, the God, the framework, the story that gave life a structure and a purpose for you, the grief of the self who believed in all of it, who organized her whole life around it, who made sacrifices for it that cannot be undone. These griefs are not sequential.

They arrive together separately and in unexpected Order or like a big ball of Christmas lights, messy something will surface. The community grief three years after the marriage grief seem resolved. The faith grief will arrive in the middle of an otherwise ordinary afternoon.

The grief of the self, the lost self, the self that was before that one tends to be the longest and the quietest and the one that needs the most company. And I want to say something about the body because I think it's one of the most important things, especially when we talk about trauma.

Both domestic violence trauma and religious trauma are somatic. They live in the body.

The hypervigilance, the fawn response, the automatic move to appeasing, placating, making yourself small and non threatening when you sense danger.

The ways the body learned over years of navigating environments where it wasn't safe to be fully present, to manage itself in specific ways that made sense then and caused confusion. Now you can flinch at a raised voice long after you know you're safe. You can feel the instinct to apologise before you've done anything wrong.

You can have a physical response to someone in authority that has nothing to do with that person, who that person actually is. That's not a rationality, that's a nervous system that learned its lessons well. Recovery in this space is not primarily cognitive. It's somatic.

Also, it happens in the body over time, with approaches that meet the body where it is. I work with modalities like brainspotting for that exact reason. Not as a plug, but as an honest reflection of why somatic approaches matter.

In this particular intersection, you can deconstruct every piece of theology intellectually and still carry it in your body. The body takes longer and it deserves work that knows that. So let me come back to where I started, because I started with a question.

What if the reason so many women couldn't see the abuse in their marriages is because the environment teaching them what love was supposed to look like was running the exact same playbook? I hope by now that question has some weight to it that it didn't have at the beginning.

Not because I want you to feel heavy, though if you do, that's appropriate, this is heavy. But because I think the weight is part of the truth. Truth. This is not a niche theological problem. This is not a small pastoral failure.

This is a structural reality that affects millions of women that has been under named for decades in both the DV and the religious trauma sectors. And that has a consequence in bodies and in families and across generations. Here is what I want you to take from this episode. Not a list.

Just a few honest things. If you've been in this space, if you've lived inside both of these things simultaneously, you are only just starting to see the parallels.

That is not a failure of intelligence or perception. It is a testament to how thoroughly the system worked. It was designed to be invisible from the inside. The confusion is not a character flaw.

The fact that it took years to name doesn't make it any less real. The fact that you believed it doesn't mean you were naive. You are inside something that was specifically constructed to be believed.

Recovery from this is possible. It is real. I've watched people do it. Takes longer than anyone will tell you it will. It's less linear than anyone tells you it will be.

And it needs people around you, practitioners, supporters, community who understand both sides of it, who don't ask you to do your DV recovery over here and your faith deconstruction over there. As if those things aren't happening at the same time within the same nervous system.

And now I want to speak directly to whoever is listening to this, who is still inside it, who is still trying to work out whether what they experienced counts, whether it was bad enough, whether they're allowed to name it, whether God is disappointed in them for asking. It counts. It counts if there were no bruises, it counts if you still love him.

It counts if you're still in the church, it counts if it has been years, it counts if you can't fully articulate it yet, it counts if nobody around you has named counts. You are not confused. You are not bitter. You are not the problem.

You are someone who is inside something that was very well constructed to keep you from seeing it clearly, and you're seeing it now. That is not nothing. That is everything. You.

Thanks for listening to beyond the Surface if this episode resonated, challenged you, or named something you've struggled to put words to, I'm really glad you found your way here. You'll find ways to connect, learn more, and explore further in the show. Notes as always, you are good.

You have always been good and your story matters always.