Thank you for this remarkable series! It’s because of your amazing work that I decided to download Substack and start reading here. I even started my own Substack account. But I am not here so much to write and teach others. But to read articles like yours and learn. Below is my story.
I met this charismatic pastor in 1985. I was an impressionable 19-year-old dating his wife’s brother at the time (btw, my boyfriend groomed me and was 8 years older than me). Let’s call this pastor’s wife Anna. She and her husband were nobodies back then. I eventually married into this ultra-religious family and this now-famous pastor became my brother-in-law.
I remember being in so much pain, physically and emotionally, showing my bruises to Anna after her brother had lost his temper again. I was told: "You need to just keep forgiving your husband as the Bible commands. This is all a test, Pia. We're saying this because we love you and we know that God is going to use all this for your own good. He's just developing your character. Someday you'll thank us and thank God for helping you towards establishing such a great ministry for women."
Uhmm...but what if my husband kills me before I even start that "great ministry." Her husband, my pastor, had a great answer for that question: "Perhaps you're called to be a martyr for Christ, Pia! If you die in the hands of your husband, you'll automatically receive the highest rewards in heaven!" So from 1986 (the year I married Anna’s brother) until 1996 (when I finally got a divorce), my pastor and my in-laws taught me to just pray and fast for my husband to change…to be quiet and submissive (1 Peter 3:1). I stopped complaining and no longer sought help.
I learned to live in the suffering and fell into this deep, dark hole of silent anger and depression for years. I honestly began to believe what my church leaders drilled into me: that this was "God's will for my life" and it was my "calling" to endure life as a battered wife. They thought I had learned to be "humble" and "mature." They didn't know I was always secretly plotting ways to end my life.
Of course I would never recommend to anyone what I did…suffer 10 long years before leaving my marriage and finally getting the professional therapeutic help I desperately needed. But I did get some things out of staying. My first-hand experience as a DV survivor. My ability to fully feel and name the fear, anger, frustration, anxiety, and depression that came from trying to survive within two toxic systems: my marriage and extended family (including my in-laws) and my church which operated more like a cult than a place of faith. Neither were safe.
They honestly helped shape me into who I am today. I’m able to be there now for other DV victims and have so much empathy and compassion wrought out of my own past anguish. Anna did say something right way back then. I do now have a “great ministry towards women” but in a very different way than she imagined. I now run a safe house for abused women and children.
I’ve long forgiven my pastor and Anna for giving me very wrong advice which almost got me killed. Today his name is everywhere and is considered a “great” spiritual leader. These days he calls himself an “apostle”—leading a global network of churches, replicating the same toxic spiritual system I was trapped in for ten years.
I pray for him and all these “great” teachers of the law. I pray for their souls. I pray for all those similar to my former brother-in-law who caused me to stumble (Matthew 18:6) and almost made me “twice as fit for hell” (Matthew 23:15). I thank the kind Christian therapists who helped bring me back from the brink of hell and because of them, I can now pay it forward. But heaven help these “Pharisees” who won’t lift a finger for a broken woman dying by the roadside. Those men who are so blinded by the spotlight on themselves—they couldn’t recognize the victims sitting in their pews Sunday after Sunday if their lives depended on it.
"Allport paraphrased Frankl this way: 'To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering.' But he immediately added an ethical boundary that matters deeply for our purposes here: 'No man can tell another what this purpose is. Each man must find out for himself, and must accept the responsibility that his answer prescribes.'”
Allport's framing sounds secular. I doubt that he's a Christian.
I learn worthwhile things from many people who are not professing Christians, but I'm always alert to how they might be missing some of the truth because they're not using Scripture to guide their thinking.
I go to the Bible to help me find meaning in my suffering. I don't want to end up with a meaning that is not consistent with the whole counsel of God. I have learned that it's dangerous to imbibe unthinkingly the explanations that coercive-controllers, morally timid sheep, and wolves in shepherds clothing push on me.
I want to think everything through for myself using Scripture as my guide and asking the Holy Spirit to explain it to me. He keeps showing me more truth from His Word. I get immersed in Bible study for hours, and it truly helps me see through the fog and untangle the false-explanations and false-interpretations which are rampant in Xtian spaces.
"Such language bends reality by converting injustice into spiritual deficiency..."
I know what your trying to say here Wade, but I think it could be said better. One problem with your language is that it does not name the perpetrators as the reality-benders. Perpetrators like language that makes them invisible.
Here's my suggestion for better wording:
The language bends reality by OBSCURING the perpetrators' culpability for the injustice, and PATHOLOGISING the victims' responses to the injustice.
I learned this language from the people who developed Response-Based Practice.
I found this spiritual bypassing or bending to be so critical in my field of psychodynamic work with my clients. For simplicity, I could say to my clients that I could help them knowing full well that I would either be colluding with the power there be by pretending that I could help them because I needed the money or to name the abuse as abuse and potentially turned clients away or terminate the therapy because I had disappointed them. In my experience, some clients do take time to accept when confronted with clinical evidence of abuse.
Thank you for this remarkable series! It’s because of your amazing work that I decided to download Substack and start reading here. I even started my own Substack account. But I am not here so much to write and teach others. But to read articles like yours and learn. Below is my story.
I met this charismatic pastor in 1985. I was an impressionable 19-year-old dating his wife’s brother at the time (btw, my boyfriend groomed me and was 8 years older than me). Let’s call this pastor’s wife Anna. She and her husband were nobodies back then. I eventually married into this ultra-religious family and this now-famous pastor became my brother-in-law.
I remember being in so much pain, physically and emotionally, showing my bruises to Anna after her brother had lost his temper again. I was told: "You need to just keep forgiving your husband as the Bible commands. This is all a test, Pia. We're saying this because we love you and we know that God is going to use all this for your own good. He's just developing your character. Someday you'll thank us and thank God for helping you towards establishing such a great ministry for women."
Uhmm...but what if my husband kills me before I even start that "great ministry." Her husband, my pastor, had a great answer for that question: "Perhaps you're called to be a martyr for Christ, Pia! If you die in the hands of your husband, you'll automatically receive the highest rewards in heaven!" So from 1986 (the year I married Anna’s brother) until 1996 (when I finally got a divorce), my pastor and my in-laws taught me to just pray and fast for my husband to change…to be quiet and submissive (1 Peter 3:1). I stopped complaining and no longer sought help.
I learned to live in the suffering and fell into this deep, dark hole of silent anger and depression for years. I honestly began to believe what my church leaders drilled into me: that this was "God's will for my life" and it was my "calling" to endure life as a battered wife. They thought I had learned to be "humble" and "mature." They didn't know I was always secretly plotting ways to end my life.
Of course I would never recommend to anyone what I did…suffer 10 long years before leaving my marriage and finally getting the professional therapeutic help I desperately needed. But I did get some things out of staying. My first-hand experience as a DV survivor. My ability to fully feel and name the fear, anger, frustration, anxiety, and depression that came from trying to survive within two toxic systems: my marriage and extended family (including my in-laws) and my church which operated more like a cult than a place of faith. Neither were safe.
They honestly helped shape me into who I am today. I’m able to be there now for other DV victims and have so much empathy and compassion wrought out of my own past anguish. Anna did say something right way back then. I do now have a “great ministry towards women” but in a very different way than she imagined. I now run a safe house for abused women and children.
I’ve long forgiven my pastor and Anna for giving me very wrong advice which almost got me killed. Today his name is everywhere and is considered a “great” spiritual leader. These days he calls himself an “apostle”—leading a global network of churches, replicating the same toxic spiritual system I was trapped in for ten years.
I pray for him and all these “great” teachers of the law. I pray for their souls. I pray for all those similar to my former brother-in-law who caused me to stumble (Matthew 18:6) and almost made me “twice as fit for hell” (Matthew 23:15). I thank the kind Christian therapists who helped bring me back from the brink of hell and because of them, I can now pay it forward. But heaven help these “Pharisees” who won’t lift a finger for a broken woman dying by the roadside. Those men who are so blinded by the spotlight on themselves—they couldn’t recognize the victims sitting in their pews Sunday after Sunday if their lives depended on it.
Narrative controllers frame their control as care. They operate from the Colonial Code Of Relationship, which goes like this:
1. You are deficient.
2. I am proficient.
3. Therefore I have the right to perform certain operations upon you.
4. These operations are undertaken for your own good.
https://cryingoutforjustice.blog/2025/03/11/the-colonial-code-of-relationship/
This hits for me not only from the abuse I sustained by my pastor but also from the person I trusted with my story. Wow. Thank you.
Thank you
"Allport paraphrased Frankl this way: 'To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering.' But he immediately added an ethical boundary that matters deeply for our purposes here: 'No man can tell another what this purpose is. Each man must find out for himself, and must accept the responsibility that his answer prescribes.'”
Allport's framing sounds secular. I doubt that he's a Christian.
I learn worthwhile things from many people who are not professing Christians, but I'm always alert to how they might be missing some of the truth because they're not using Scripture to guide their thinking.
I go to the Bible to help me find meaning in my suffering. I don't want to end up with a meaning that is not consistent with the whole counsel of God. I have learned that it's dangerous to imbibe unthinkingly the explanations that coercive-controllers, morally timid sheep, and wolves in shepherds clothing push on me.
I want to think everything through for myself using Scripture as my guide and asking the Holy Spirit to explain it to me. He keeps showing me more truth from His Word. I get immersed in Bible study for hours, and it truly helps me see through the fog and untangle the false-explanations and false-interpretations which are rampant in Xtian spaces.
"Such language bends reality by converting injustice into spiritual deficiency..."
I know what your trying to say here Wade, but I think it could be said better. One problem with your language is that it does not name the perpetrators as the reality-benders. Perpetrators like language that makes them invisible.
Here's my suggestion for better wording:
The language bends reality by OBSCURING the perpetrators' culpability for the injustice, and PATHOLOGISING the victims' responses to the injustice.
I learned this language from the people who developed Response-Based Practice.
https://www.responsebasedpractice.com/
I found this spiritual bypassing or bending to be so critical in my field of psychodynamic work with my clients. For simplicity, I could say to my clients that I could help them knowing full well that I would either be colluding with the power there be by pretending that I could help them because I needed the money or to name the abuse as abuse and potentially turned clients away or terminate the therapy because I had disappointed them. In my experience, some clients do take time to accept when confronted with clinical evidence of abuse.