Anger, Forgiveness, and Church Hurt

Full Disclosure: I am a Christian AND I struggle with various aspects of church culture. As a trauma therapist, I have sat with many clients healing from the spiritual abuse and rejection they have experienced in their church communities. Each story I hear has given me an opportunity to wrestle with an emotion I used to avoid at all costs: anger. I have had my own faith deconstruction journey of wrestling through my anger while still holding onto the essence of what I love about my Christian faith.

If you have experienced spiritual abuse, church hurt or something in your Christian culture that doesn’t feel congruent with a deeper part of you, I am here to tell you that there is a path forward.

Anything healthy changes, and change is HARD. It is okay if you feel anger (you are not a bad person for having this emotion). There is a place for you to both heal these wounds and embrace your faith. Working through this process is what I refer to as faith deconstruction. It is okay to feel your emotions—they do not have to destroy you.

That is the scary part, right? The stakes are high. You are afraid that if you veer off from the path others in your church community have set for you, that you will fall away from God or lose your faith altogether. Your emotions are a beautiful part of you–they show you the path toward healing and they help you connect with God in an authentic and vulnerable way. God doesn’t need your facade to connect with you. You belong just as you are right now.

How “forbidden emotions” prevent your healing

Let’s talk about anger. I frequently hear in therapy sessions with my clients statements like “but I shouldn’t feel angry,” “I’m supposed to forgive them,” “I should be at peace with everyone,” and the list goes on and on. These statements come from the hierarchy of emotions and emotional experiences that Christian communities have upheld for generations. Anger tends to exist at the bottom of the hierarchy, while peace, kindness, and love exist near the top.

The problem with this is that whether you listen to your emotions or avoid them, they are still there.

Your anger doesn’t make you a bad person–listening to your anger may help you discover the underlying roots to your pain. Healing involves listening to what your emotions—even the “ugly” emotions—want to tell you about yourself, your experience of the world, and your needs.

But my church community is encouraging me to renew my mind. Why isn’t this enough?

As a therapist, I can absolutely affirm the value of renewing your mind (CBT focuses on this very thing!). However, developing different thought patterns cannot be a replacement for feeling your emotions. Often, I see Christian communities rush into thinking new thoughts in reaction to noticing painful or “forbidden” emotions showing up. This is a defense mechanism called intellectualization. In the Western World, we LOVE this defense mechanism–it helps us feel like we are doing healing work without having to experience the painful processes involved in true healing.

If you are not deeply in touch with your emotional reality and how this has shaped your thoughts, renewing your mind will be a bandaid that ignores your deeper needs and wounds. For example, an emotion such as anger may feel “inappropriate” to feel, yet your anger may be trying to tell you that there is an injustice you are experiencing, a lack of respect you received, or a fear you are navigating. Wholeness involves integrating your mind, body, and emotions. Your emotions are important to listen to, even though they are not meant to be the only thing you listen to.

My church community is encouraging me to forgive the person who abused me, but i’m just not ready. Am I a bad person?

Avoiding emotions like anger have caused many in the Christian community to forgive prematurely, which does not leave space for them to process negative emotions. I often hear clients say, “God tells us we must forgive or else we will not be forgiven.”

Forgiveness is powerful and important in relationships, but when someone places pressure on you to forgive immediately, they rob you of the opportunity to tend to your pain and heal your wounds.

Instead of healing your trauma or the attachment wound you have endured, you feel pressured to skip over the emotional processing that is critical for true healing.

Before we discuss how premature forgiveness impacts trauma specifically, I want to make a quick note about the emotional experience of forgiveness. The presence or absence of certain emotions is NOT a measure of the authenticity of your forgiveness. You are free to feel pain, anger, and other negative emotions that arise when you remember a hurtful event or experience something that reminds you of the event. Your pain and emotions are not a sign of unforgiveness–they are an indicator to you that there is still more healing to be done. You wounds have not yet transitioned to being scars. And that is okay. You will get there in time. There is space for you to simultaneously extend forgiveness to the person who hurt you and connect with your emotions and needs.

How Premature Forgiveness Delays Healing Your Trauma

As mentioned earlier, premature forgiveness can be a way that people escape the uncomfortable emotions that arise from traumatic memories. The danger of this is that trauma work involves integrating your mind, body, and emotions, yet premature forgiveness may be a form of escapism that ignores the emotional parts of you. As a result, you continue to be disconnected from yourself.

One way that premature forgiveness disconnects you from yourself is by taking care of the perpetrator by offering them forgiveness before taking care of what you, as the victim, need and are experiencing emotionally. If you have experienced traumatic relationships where you were expected to take care of your abuser, premature forgiveness may be a form of continuing the abusive cycle. Narcissistic relationships are a prime example of this.

Christian communities urge us to love our enemies–and YES, by all means, love the people who hurt you, but not without boundaries and not by abandoning yourself.

Narcissistic individuals will frequently abuse their victims and follow the abuse with a heartfelt apology and dramatic gestures of love that keeps victims returning to the abuse. Tuning into your emotions can help you recognize when you are being abused and can inform you of the boundaries you need in order to feel emotionally safe in your relationships.

The counseling room is a place where you have every permission to focus on your own needs and feelings. This is the place where you can come and receive unconditional love and acceptance. This experience of love is not only healing, but it can also help you grow closer to being able to offer forgiveness.

There is a time and space for you to experience the emotions and reality of your abuse, and it precedes forgiveness.

As a counselor, I encourage my clients to take up space. Your emotions belong in the therapy room. The therapy room is a place where these wounded parts of you can encounter unconditional love, which transforms and heals. Counseling is a place for you to focus on yourself and heal so that it is possible that you can one day engage in genuine forgiveness. Self-love and compassion must precede the gift of love for the people who have hurt us.