At the Threshold: Reading Holy Hurt Through Lived Experience
I won’t be offering a traditional book review of Holy Hurt. Instead, I’ll be sharing my reflections and responses as I read, drawing from both my professional lens and my lived experience. And truly, the more I learn about therapy and healing, the less sense it makes to try to separate those two. The personal and the professional interweave and inform each other.
As the author notes in her introduction, this topic is deeply personal to her. I can relate to that; it is deeply personal to me as well. My recent ancestors were very involved in conservative Christianity and were missionaries and evangelists. The church loomed large in my experience of childhood and adolescence.
The author describes the struggle of finishing writing the book, because spiritual trauma is a personal wound, and so she understandably avoids turning towards the pain. I think this is a very human reaction that many folks can relate to. As I engage with this topic, I feel a similar cringe and desire to avoid the pain, because the impacts of spiritual injury run deep.
When I reflect on the impact of an evangelical Christian upbringing, the deepest and most enduring harm is the teaching that trusting yourself is not just unwise but dangerous. Self-trust is framed as a moral failure. Because people are viewed as inherently sinful and selfish, listening to your own inner sense is portrayed as a path toward error and destruction. I absorbed this message daily, both explicitly and implicitly: nothing good could come from trusting myself. Instead, trust was to be placed in God, and God was defined for you by pastors and other authority figures.
Finding a way back to self-trust has been a very, very long road. When I think about the touchstones along the way, making friends with my body and my sensory experience has been important. Finding ways to sit quietly with myself has been essential, along with processing trauma and getting to know the wounds to my nervous system that came from suppressing my intuition for so long.
In Holy Hurt, McBride writes about healing from religious trauma as a return to wholeness. I find myself uncertain about that framing. The idea of striving for “wholeness” feels closely tied to a good/bad or broken/fixed binary that I am trying to move beyond. In the stories shared by the people I work with, there is no clear divide between broken and whole. Instead, their experiences are shaped by both/and; by multiple truths existing at the same time. The effects of trauma never fully disappear, and the relentless push to “heal” it can become a subtle form of oppression in itself.
Yesterday I attended an in-person training with McBride where she spoke about the nuances of this. That healing is a process, not a destination. This is hard for us to understand and accept in a culture that reinforces the idea that healing your trauma is yet another way to optimize your productivity. Still, even if we can’t erase what has happened, so much can be gained from changing how we relate to it.
Many of the therapists, writers, and thinkers Hilary interviews in Holy Hurt also carry their own histories of spiritual or religious harm. They have come to this work not from a place of distance, but from lived experience, supporting others while continuing their own healing. I find this deeply relatable. There is a lot of meaning in showing others the stones along a path that helped you move forward after experiencing spiritual harm.
The journey of coming to terms with what we have been through might not be a path to perfect wholeness. But it can be meaningful. It can help us understand the sources of emotional harm and develop the hard-won self-awareness needed to reduce the harm we might otherwise cause to others. In my view, that potential alone is a worthwhile reason to try.
