Monday, January 11, 2010

Being Told to "Get Over It and Move On"


"Just get over it and move on with God." We hear this phrase way too many times coming from well-intentioned people regarding our spiritually abusive experiences. It sounds great on paper, but in reality it is impossible. You will never "get over" spiritual abuse - you just need to get through it. For example, a rape victim cannot just "get over it and move on". They need to process their grief, and deal with the pain and emotional trauma. It's the same for spiritual abuse victims. You cannot just stuff it all to be "religiously correct", because it will never go away.

The phrase "get over it and move on" is a term that was authored and abused by authoritarian spiritual abusers to get their followers to turn their brains off so that they won't think for themselves. I can remember this phrase being used on me so many times. Whenever I showed any human emotion whatsoever, I was told to "rise up" and "get over it and move on". I would choke back my pain and grief, and stuff my emotions. While it may be the only way to win on a battlefield, it is simply not a healthy way to deal with all of life's issues. It simply serves to get you to stop analyzing and thinking for yourself.

I was an emotional basket case for the first few years after escaping my spiritually abusive situation. All of the pent-up grief, stifled anger, and repressed frustrations came tumbling out of the closet that I had been stuffing it in for years. It took quite a while to sort through all of it. Fortunately I turned immediately to educating myself about spiritual abuse, which made it much more understandable. Many people deal with spiritual abuse and don't even know what it is. It really helps to get educated on the topic.

Let's face it, if there really was a healthy way to "get over it and move on", there would not be a need for websites like this one. In my opinion, you cannot just "move on" or escape from a spiritually abusive experience. You must go through it (the recovery process), and eventually you get to the other side. It's a journey that takes time. The only way to "move on" would be to go back and erase the abuse that you experienced. Since you cannot do that, you just go through it. I think of it as a withdrawal from a dangerous addictive drug.

I have found that before I was able to go through a grieving process, I had to allow myself to become angry about the abuse I suffered. In the group that I was involved with, we were taught to passively allow someone to use and abuse us. Through this process we learn to stuff all of our emotions. This can result in people not allowing themselves to get angry when someone violates your personal boundaries - or when they do, it becomes passive/aggressive. I'm not talking about going out and beating your abuser with a ball bat, but rather, just getting mad enough inside to evict the passivity that we allowed to rule us. This passivity is the force that caused us to not only allow the abuse, but also to stuff sadness, anger, grief, and even our ability to be analytical and skeptical about what we were being taught.

Once we begin thinking for ourselves again and getting our ability to say "no" back, a flood of emotions may come back to us: anger, grief, and sometimes even hate. Anger will turn to grief, and then we can process the grief to get rid of the anger. Tolerance of our abuse will turn to hate, and then we can process the hate to bring about true forgiveness and build healthy boundaries to keep it from happening again. Sadness about being a victim will drive us to break out of our isolation, and we can begin to trust again.

Notice: The articles on this website are derived from the opinions of the webmaster of this website, and nothing more.

30 comments:

  1. How do you get through it? I was in a spiritually abusive work environment (teacher at christian school) where my pastor repeatly called me into long meetings and insulted and yelled at me. Then he would be kind and reasonable. This went on until, after a 3 1/2 hour "meeting" something just clicked and I quit. He consequently had me shunned from the church - teachers who were my friends actually stared at the wall behind me when I tried to talk to them the last few times I was at church. I feel stuck in my grief and don't know how to get out? Suggestions?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Responding to an old post here, but I went through something very much like this at my church as a teenager when a fundamentalist youth pastor was elected. We had a 3 hour "meeting" like that after I raised concerns about perfectionism creeping in, and over the next year he gradually excommunicated me by shunning, removal from service, and finally a mandate that I wasn't "spiritually mature". How did I get out of it? Very, very slowly. I switched to another church and my relationship with God actually deepened for a time (having no one else to turn to will do that for you...), then I dropped out of church altogether. To this day, I'm told to "get over it" by my church leader family. I finally processed it all when I went to see a counselor, who encouraged me to work through the grief I never really processed, and to not throw out the baby with the bathwater by avoiding all things spiritual, since God had been such a source of strength and life for me. Almost a year later now, I'm seriously thinking about trying a local church , but still have cold feet. My relationship with God, however, is back and more full of grace than ever before, and I'm letting him work in his time. As my counselor said, there's no rush -- I'll go back to church when I'm strong enough to trust and discern.

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  3. funny, I just came back to this post since my first comment in 2011 and there were your remarks! I did finally try another christian school and was burned again. Many nice teachers there but some really mean and selfish ones, just wanting a cushy job where they did NOTHING for the kids and bullied those who wanted to. Very ugly, got yelled at for just wanting to help kids read and compile fluency scores (to see if our program was really helping the kids!). I teach in a public school now with very nice teachers. Want to go back to a church again but am afraid to be hurt again. Maybe in time. But I do see how my relationship with God is deeper - He is the ONLY one I can trust now (besides great hubby and kids). Thanks for our reply. Good luck in your church search

    ReplyDelete
  4. funny, I just came back to this post since my first comment in 2011 and there were your remarks! I did finally try another christian school and was burned again. Many nice teachers there but some really mean and selfish ones, just wanting a cushy job where they did NOTHING for the kids and bullied those who wanted to. Very ugly, got yelled at for just wanting to help kids read and compile fluency scores (to see if our program was really helping the kids!). I teach in a public school now with very nice teachers. Want to go back to a church again but am afraid to be hurt again. Maybe in time. But I do see how my relationship with God is deeper - He is the ONLY one I can trust now (besides great hubby and kids). Thanks for our reply. Good luck in your church search

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  11. I was really touched by the blog and comments. I have never really talked about my experience, probably never will to anyone I know; however, seeing so many others going through similar experiences made me realize that it was more common than I thought. Here all this time I felt so guilty for leaving my church group, but so ashamed for being so gullible and believing every single thing I was told. Whenever I do happen to run across a member of my former church, I either don't exist for them anymore or they pretend they never met me even though I spent years worshiping next to them, dining at their homes, etc. I know my journey hasn't been nearly as difficult as it has been for some people. I still have a difficult time attending a church even though I want Christian fellowship and a deeper relationship with Jesus. It's good to know that things can and do get better. Thanks for writing about a difficult topic.

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