By Magdalena Sanchez 
“Near is the Lord to the brokenhearted, and he saves those who are crushed in spirit.”
—Psalm 34:18
Introduction: closing a series, opening a path
With this piece, we come to the end of our series on spiritual abuse. Over these weeks we have walked a painful but necessary path. We began with “Power disguised as faith: understanding spiritual abuse,” where we exposed how certain forms of leadership and religious practices manipulate conscience and distort the image of God. Then, in “From the altar to the body: when spiritual abuse prepares the ground for sexual abuse,” we explored the connection between religious manipulation and sexual violence that finds fertile ground in ecclesial contexts. Last week, in “When the Church remains silent: silence as an accomplice to abuse,” we examined how institutional silence perpetuates harm and protects abusers.
Today we close the series with a theme that many survivors long for, yet fear to approach:
How is wounded faith healed?
How is spirituality rebuilt after the hands that were meant to bless struck, and the words that were meant to liberate were used to control?
This text seeks to respond with honest hope:
faith can rise again—but only through care, truth, and justice.
- The healing process: from trauma to hope
Healing from spiritual abuse is not an event but a process—slow, complex, and deeply human. Religious trauma embeds itself in the deepest places of the self: it affects identity, inner freedom, one’s relationship with God, and the capacity to trust others.
The theologian Nancy Pineda-Madrid reminds us that “all authentic healing is necessarily communal, because the harm was also communal.” ¹ Spiritual abuse almost never occurs in isolation; it takes place within communities, liturgies, doctrines, and power dynamics. For that reason, healing must also involve safe contexts, healthy relationships, and respectful accompaniment.
Those who have suffered spiritual abuse often face:
- confusion about God,
- false guilt,
- fear of freedom,
- shame for having trusted,
- loss of spiritual meaning,
- a desire to believe again, mixed with fear of repeating the same painful story.
Healing requires untangling inner knots: what I was told about God was not necessarily God.
Healing means separating the abuser’s voice from the divine voice.
Trauma is not the end of the story. As Isaiah proclaims:
“The Spirit of the Lord… heals the brokenhearted… binds up the wounded… proclaims freedom” (Isa 61:1–3).
- The spirituality of tenderness: Ivone Gebara and Leonardo Boff
The theologian Ivone Gebara proposes a faith that arises from the body, from the inner whisper, from everyday care. For her, tenderness is a spiritual alternative to patriarchal and violent systems. ² Tenderness is not weakness; it is resistance—affirming humanity where it has been denied.
Leonardo Boff, for his part, affirms that care is the ethical foundation that sustains life, and that only a spirituality grounded in care can counter violence. ³ His proposal offers a lens for understanding that all authentic pastoral practice is born of deep respect for human dignity, especially the dignity of wounded persons.
Applied to spiritual abuse, Gebara and Boff teach us that healing involves:
- learning to trust the body again,
- allowing faith to be rebuilt through gentleness rather than fear,
- reimagining God as a source of care rather than control,
- giving oneself permission to feel, to weep, to question, to doubt,
- cultivating a faith that shelters rather than imposes.
- Accompanying with a trauma-informed approach: safety, autonomy, and empowerment
Accompanying someone who has suffered spiritual abuse requires a different pastoral ethic. It is not enough to “pray for the person” or to offer memorized verses. What is needed is trauma-informed accompaniment, that is:
- a) Safety
The person must feel emotionally, spiritually, and physically safe.
Without safety, there is no healing. - b) Autonomy
Spiritual abuse stripped away inner freedom; accompaniment must restore it.
All imposition, authoritarian advice, or spiritual pressure is avoided. - c) Empowerment
To empower is not to coerce, but to return the inner power that was stolen.
Healing occurs when the person rediscovers their own voice.
As Pineda-Madrid affirms, healing takes place when the survivor experiences agency—when they feel they are standing again. ¹
- Liturgies and rites that help heal
Liturgy can be either a weapon or a refuge. Many survivors cannot return to the same songs, symbols, or practices in which abuse occurred. Yet it is also true that well-crafted liturgy can foster healing.
Some restorative practices include:
- prayers that name pain without spiritualizing it,
- rites of lament in the tradition of the Psalms,
- safe spaces of silence,
- blessings that restore dignity,
- communal healing ceremonies,
- biblical readings that reveal a God who weeps with the wounded.
In John 20, the risen Jesus appears showing his wounds (Jn 20:19–22). He does not hide them. He does not erase them.
Resurrected wounds become a language of consolation: it is possible to live after being wounded.
- Restorative communities: from control to communal discernment
A restorative community does not revolve around a leader, but around shared discernment.
It does not command; it listens.
It does not demand obedience; it fosters mutual responsibility.
Necessary shifts include:
- replacing submission with discernment,
- replacing pastoral control with horizontal relationships,
- replacing a theology of fear with a theology of care,
- replacing a culture of silence with shared voice.
As Gebara insists, healing is not achieved by repeating harmful structures, but by creating new forms of community where people can feel at home again. ²
Conclusion: when faith is reborn
Wounded faith can heal.
But it does not return as naïve.
It becomes freer, more conscious, more human.
Healing wounded faith means:
- discovering that God was not the aggressor,
- recovering the voice that was silenced,
- trusting again—with caution and truth,
- finding God in small acts of care rather than in shouts from the pulpit,
- reweaving community through truth.
The spirituality that is reborn after spiritual abuse is often more authentic, more tender, more embodied—as though new wisdom were emerging from pain.
May this closing of the series also be an opening: the beginning of a healing journey for our communities.
References
Nancy Pineda-Madrid, Suffering and Salvation in Ciudad Juárez (Fortress Press, 2011).
Ivone Gebara, Intuiciones ecofeministas (Trotta, 2000).
Leonardo Boff, El cuidado esencial (Trotta, 2002).