by Nell Hardy

Thank you to Stephen for inviting me to contribute to this blog, as someone who has silently been following it over the last few months. I am an actor, writer, theatre facilitator and the founder of Response Ability Theatre, a socially conscious company that seeks to represent and support people whose lives have been derailed by trauma. I am also a survivor of spiritual (among other) abuse from a Church of England priest, who was also my father.

While working on R.A.T.’s first show – NoMad, my solo piece about my experiences of homelessness and mental health hospitalisation – I worked with experts in theatre outreach and mental health interventions to develop a two-stranded workshop programme. One workshop is for trauma survivors: it explores physical, metaphorical and symbolic ways of identifying and giving expression to one’s experience of trauma, empowering survivors to make sense in themselves of the hold their trauma has on them, and to explain their needs and perspectives to those around them.

The other is for social and mental health service providers: it identifies empathy as the most valuable tool in the kit of anyone working directly with trauma survivors, and teaches performance-based breath techniques and body language awareness to support workers to remain emotionally available, and so able to inform their problem-solving with instinctive compassion, without being dangerously vulnerable or inappropriate. This strand in particular brings something very new to the welfare sectors, and has been received with great enthusiasm by professionals I have encountered who are committing to person-centred, trauma-informed work.

I am now beginning development of my company’s second show, which will explore spiritual abuse, the role of spirituality in modern life, and the struggle to live with integrity under structures fuelled by narcissism, individualism and fundamentalism (in both its religious and secular forms). My aim is to raise awareness in an increasingly secular, anti-religious society, of how difficult it is psychologically to remove oneself from philosophies that have shaped how you see yourself and the world around you, and practically to extricate yourself from the communities around which your way of life has been built. To draw comparisons between the spiritual abuse that can come from religious affiliation, and the punishing ideologies and practices we all have to accept and absorb to survive in the ‘civilised’ world. To look at what happens when we lose our power and inclination to reflect on the values by which we live, and from there to ask what it really means to be a nurturing, accommodating and respectful citizen.

The creative realization of this project will bring with it the adaptation and offer of my workshop programme to survivors of spiritual abuse, and to spiritual leaders such as priests, imams, rabbis – who, as readers of this blog will undoubtedly know, are effectively social workers thanks to the overlap of spiritual pastoral duties and legal safeguarding requirements for any organisation in the modern world. I would like to explain further why I think such work is crucial for the well-being of survivors of spiritual abuse, including those whose experience came from the Church; for priests and other faith leaders who find themselves ministering under the same styles of bureaucracy that grip our welfare services; and for the integrity of organised spiritual practice going forward.

The big problem we have with trauma is that it is necessarily triggered by a social wrong that needs to be addressed for any mental health intervention to be effective – but the second our society sees someone in distress without a cause that is to them visible, various disempowering labels start being attached to the person. A flock of geese that flies away out of fear on hearing an unexpected loud noise is responding appropriately to perceived threat, but someone who breaks down when left under the power of a cruel manipulator has severe anxiety, neuroses, a personality disorder. To wider society, these labels lead to the assumption that the person is delusional, or a compulsive liar, or in some way not to be trusted and believed. In the person themselves, it creates deep-set confusion about whether wrong was actually done to them in the first place or whether it was “all in their mind”, and heightened fight or flight physical responses to everyday scenarios that can leave them feeling powerless to speak for themselves.

So where does the Church come in? Well, for a start, it is responsible for an awful lot of trauma survivors in our world today – and I would argue that spiritual abuse results in the most internalised trauma of all. If a child is mistreated by a parent, and builds their self-esteem around that experience, it takes a long time free from that influence and making new healthier connections with other people to get on to a new path. If someone is misrepresented by psychiatry and doubts their functionality, it requires a lot of risk-taking to prove themselves internally and to others. But how about when someone is told that God wants them to suffer? What risk can give you an alternative to God’s voice? What higher power can validate you than God? Where do you go for healing when God is harmful?

The Church in our time is also effectively a support service. Priests are social workers, and as a result often fall into the same traps of invalidating treatment towards their congregations, getting caught between various services when they do genuinely try to help, and hiding behind ‘safeguarding’ procedures to avoid taking responsibility for their actions, as others working at the mercy of highly bureaucratic systems do. But weirdly – in my experience, anyway – the fact of it being a faith body, with staff on atypical payment patterns and running with a high percentage of volunteers, seems to exempt it from a whole host of policy checks and accountabilities. The Head of Safeguarding for the Church of England when I was working my way through the complaints process described the Church’s safeguarding practice as the weirdest she had ever come across – without seeming to think she had any responsibility or power to change it.

As a result, that mentality of protecting each other instead of protecting the individual easily seeps into their professional mode – and once it’s there on the pastoral side, it can easily seep into ministry as well. Cue preaching styles that invalidate, traumatize and re-traumatize, that dictate rather than inviting questions and thought. Spiritual services are theatrical events, in which spectators are engaged on a heightened emotive level, told what to say and when to say it, and not invited to contribute directly to the conversation. Like theatre, they can be profoundly thought-provoking and inspiring in the right hands, or dull, prescriptive and frightening in the wrong hands. And of course, unfortunately, there are those priests who actively use their ministry to harm or take advantage of people. These, like most abusers, know very, very well how to make general society’s ignorance about mental health and trauma to their advantage.

The more spiritual abuse survivors are able to express themselves with confidence and empathetic force, the more success stories we will see, the fewer will be allowed to be brushed off the shoulders of people who don’t care. And the more people in wider society who see the vital insights of these survivors, and empathise on a bodily, instinctive level with their struggles, the more heed we will find being paid to the social lessons to be learned from our experiences. And our increasingly secular, decreasingly spiritually reflective society certainly could do with being reminded of their own spiritual vulnerabilities, how they leave them open to manipulation in and out of spiritual spheres, and brought in touch with how to support those emerging from spiritual abuse in safe communities in wider society.

I would love to hear from readers about if anyone else has used creativity as a kind of therapeutic intervention – and if so, if this was done in a Church or religion-conscious sphere? Neither Stephen nor I are aware of this offer existing anywhere. If something were to be started, do you think you would find it beneficial to your recovery?

And on the note of the public play I will eventually be putting on – what would you want wider secular society to understand about being a believer, or survivor of spiritual abuse, or reliant on a Church/spiritual community for acceptance and safety, in our times?

If I haven’t dizzied you with words already, I would like to welcome you to have a look at my website, www.responseabilitytheatre.com, for more information about my practice.