Johnson/VanVonderen write:
6. You may be preoccupied with spiritual performance.
Preoccupation with spiritual performance often results in a tendency toward extremes of self-righteousness or shame. Self-righteousness (a sense of spiritual superiority based on your own behavior) and judgmentalism (a sense of spiritual superiority based upon someone else's behavior) indicate a performance-based lifestyle. Another indicator is perfectionism, or a need for situations and relationships to be "just so."
Shame, the flip-side of self-righteousness, is also a result of a performance-based mentality. Shame is a sense of inferiority, a negative self-assessment, and indictment on your very personhood. It results from experiencing relationships where love and acceptance are based upon behaviors, and where the constant message is that you don't measure up.
7. You have a distorted self-identity of yourself as a Christian.
People who have been spiritually abused tend to have a negative picture of self, or a shame-based identity. This can be seen in several ways:
a. Lack of understanding or even awareness of New Testament texts that elaborate on our identity as new creations in Christ.
b. Confusion between guilt and shame. Guilt is a valuable signal indicating a wrong or bad behavior. Shame is an indictment on you as a person. You experience guilt when you do a wrong behavior; guilt is a good spiritual nerve ending causing you to right wrong behavior. you feel shame even when you've done nothing wrong; you feel defective as a human being, and like a third-rate Christian undeserving of God's blessings and acceptance.
c. A high need to hang on to negative picture of self in order to explain negative behaviors. This is true of spiritual systems that teach or insinuate that even though you are saved, you're still "worthless" before God, "just a sinner saved by grace," "a worm and not a person."
8. You may have a problem relating to spiritual authority.
Being spiritually abused can lead to "toxic faith." Toxic faith is a destructive and dangerous relationship with a religious system, not with God, that allows this system to control a person's life in the name of God. Those who have experienced the misuse of power develop ways to defend themselves from being abused again. They tend to extremes of compliance or defiance when faced with someone having authority. The compliant will conform to the wishes of the one in authority, going along with the authority whether or not they agree, and whether or not the authority is right. The defiant may resist those who have power even if they agree on the inside. Their resistance is almost a kneejerk reaction to anyone in charge. This, too, is designed to prevent hurt -- but it won't work.
9. You may have a hard time admitting the abuse.
This is common among spiritual abuse victims for several reasons. In an abusive system, you are told that you are "the problem" for noticing that there is a problem. That makes it hard to expose the abuse, even after you've left the system.
Second, admitting the abuse out loud -- or even thinking that what you experienced was abuse -- often feels like you're being disloyal to family, to church, even to God. Third, those who have experienced spiritual abuse as "normal" have lost track of what normal really is. Therefore, to call it spiritual abuse feels crazy or overreactive. People who experience spiritual abuse often can't believe it is happening to them.
10. You may have a hard time with trust.
Those who have been spiritually abused will have a hard time trusting a spiritual system again. This is extremely significant, because the essence of living as a Christian is a trust relationship with God, within God's family.
It seems hard to believe that Christians, who have answered Jesus' invitation to life and freedom, could so quickly return to a treadmill kind of spirituality that produces soul-deadening weariness.
thank you so much !
ReplyDeletethank you so much
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