Why Didn't I Trust the Feeling That Something Was Wrong? Spiritual Abuse and the Loss of Self-Trust
Spiritual Abuse and Loss of self-trust
How abusive religious environments can teach people to distrust their own experience and feelings, and how that trust can be rebuilt
Note: Please be aware that this article contains discussion of sexual grooming, spiritual abuse, and their psychological effects. Readers who have experienced abuse in religious settings may find some content activating. If you are currently working with a therapist or psychologist, you may find it helpful to read this alongside that support. If you are not, and you find the content distressing, please consider reaching out to a mental health professional. Support is available through: Lifeline: 13 11 14 (24 hours) Beyond Blue: 1300 22 4636 (24 hours) 1800RESPECT: 1800 737 732 (national sexual assault, domestic and family violence counselling service, 24 hours). Any stories or examples provided are an example only and do not describe a specific client, person or event. Some of the information we provide on our website may be information related to health and medical issues, but it's not meant to be health and medical "advice". We provide this information for your general use only. While we try to provide accurate information, it may be historical, incomplete information or based on opinions that aren't widely held. Your personal situation has not been considered when providing the information, so any reliance on this information is at your sole risk. We recommend seeking independent professional advice before relying on the information we provide. Find the full terms of service here: Terms of Service | Refuge Psychology
How abusive religious environments can teach people to distrust their own experience and feelings, and how that trust can be rebuilt
One of the most common things I hear from people recovering from spiritual abuse is some version of this: "I knew something was wrong. I felt it. But I didn't trust it, and I stayed a long time despite knowing things were not ok."
They say it with a kind of bewilderment, and often with regret and shame. How could they have seen and felt the warning signs and still not acted on them? But what seems clear in retrospect was rarely clear at the time. More often, during their involvement in the spiritually abusive group, those feelings and thoughts were dismissed or suppressed by the people around them and by themselves. Why did their own sense of things count for so little against the words of a leader, a mentor or a community? And why, even now, having left, do they still find it so hard to trust their own understanding of what happened, or their read on the people and situations in the spiritual environments they are part of today?
This article is an attempt to answer those questions. It draws on a few ideas from psychology and philosophy to explain how any of us come to trust our own perceptions in the first place, why that trust can be fragile, and how certain religious environments, through the misuse of scripture, authority and community, teach people to override it. It then looks at why this pattern tends to follow people even after they leave, and what recovery involves.
If you have ever asked yourself why you didn't trust what you knew, I hope this gives you an answer that makes sense of it and takes some of the shame out of it. What happened to you was not a failure of intelligence or a weakness of character. It was the predictable result of a particular kind of environment acting on a particular part of being human.
How we learn to trust what we feel
Nobody is born knowing what they feel. A baby experiences hunger, discomfort, fear, excitement, but has no words for any of it and no way to make sense of it. The words and sense-making come from outside. A parent looks at the child, works out what is going on, and says it back: "You're frightened. It's alright, I'm here." Or: "You're tired, aren't you." Or: "That hurt."
This happens thousands of times over a childhood. Each time, the child learns something. This feeling in my body is called fear. This one is sadness. When I feel this, I am allowed to feel it, and someone will help. Slowly, the child builds an inner map, and with it a basic confidence: what I feel is real, and I can trust it.
There is a second layer to this as well. A secure parent (or other caregiver) does more than name the feeling. They treat it as making sense. "It makes sense that you feel that way." "Of course it hurts when someone treats you like that." "I can see how upset this has made you." The child is not only learning what the feeling is called. They are learning that their feelings are reasonable responses to real things, that they arise for a reason, and that the reason can be trusted. Over time, this becomes a quiet assumption: if I feel that something is wrong, something probably is.
The important thing here is that we do not learn to trust ourselves and understand and interpret our feelings on our own. We learn it by being seen accurately by someone else. Our confidence in our own feelings is built out of how reliably the people around us noticed and named them when we were small (Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist & Target, 2002).
Now imagine a child whose feelings were routinely contradicted instead. "You're not upset." "That didn't hurt." "Stop being so dramatic." "You're exaggerating." "There's nothing to be scared of." This child still has the feelings, but never learns to trust them. Instead, they learn something else: the adult's version of what is happening is the real one. They learn that their own sense of things is probably wrong. It is safer to go with and trust what the more powerful person says.
Three ways of handling what other people tell you
A psychologist called Peter Fonagy has spent a long time studying how we decide whom to believe. He uses the phrase epistemic trust, which just means trust in what other people tell you about the world (Fonagy & Allison, 2014). We all need some of this. If you could not trust others' accounts or knowledge, you could never learn from a teacher, a doctor, a friend or a book.
But this trust needs to be balanced. Fonagy and his colleagues describe three different ways people handle information from others (Campbell et al., 2021).
The first is healthy trust. You are open to what people tell you, but you weigh it against what you already know and against what you can see and feel for yourself. If a friend says "you seem fine," but you feel awful, you notice the gap.
The second is mistrust. You shut people out. Nobody's input gets through, even when it would help.
The third is credulity. This is the one that matters most here. Credulity means taking in what you are told without checking it against your own judgment, and without asking whether the person telling you is reliable. If someone in authority says you are fine, you are fine. If they say you are the problem, you are the problem. Your own sense of things is discounted as not being valid or worth considering.
Fonagy's research found that credulity is more common in people who had difficult or neglectful childhoods, and that it leaves people wide open to being taken advantage of (Campbell et al., 2021). Credulous people are not unintelligent. They can think perfectly well. They can also sense and feel things as well as anyone. What has usually happened is that, somewhere along the way, they developed ways of not paying attention to those feelings, because attending to them was once unsafe or pointless. These might include talking themselves out of what they noticed, minimising it, going numb, keeping busy, or, in more extreme cases, dissociating from the feeling altogether. The feeling is still there. It just no longer gets through. And what is missing at the level of thought is the sense that their own perceptions count for anything, that what they notice deserves a place in deciding what is true.
Why some people are more vulnerable
Put these two ideas together and something uncomfortable becomes clear.
If self-trust is built by being seen accurately as a child, then people who were not seen accurately grow up without a solid inner reference point. When something feels wrong, they have no settled confidence that the feeling can be trusted.
And if you cannot rely on your own sense of things, you have to rely on something. Other people's accounts fill the gap. What the more confident person says becomes the version of reality you work from, not because you have weighed it and found it convincing, but because it is the only version that feels solid. This is where the credulity Fonagy describes comes from. A childhood of not being seen becomes an adulthood of deferring to whoever sounds most sure.
This is one reason why people with painful childhoods, and especially those with a history of complex trauma, can be more vulnerable to spiritual abuse and to adult clergy sexual abuse and exploitation. The harmful environment does not have to break their self-trust. It just has to step into a gap that was already there: their mistrust of their own interpretation of their experiences and feelings.
How religious environments can reinforce the habit of self-doubt and not trusting yourself
A healthy spiritual community should provide plenty of space for autonomy of choice and thought. It should also be a place where people are seen accurately, where their experience is taken seriously, and where they are helped to grow in wisdom and discernment, and not encouraged to be too reliant on others. Many communities do exactly that. But some, whether they mean to or not, teach their members to distrust themselves, and they can use scripture to do it.
Take the common teaching that faith comes first, then facts, then feelings. The idea is that feelings are unreliable, the heart is deceitful, and we should not be led by our emotions but by what we know to be true. If we think the right things, the feelings will eventually catch up. There is a grain of wisdom in this. Feelings are not always accurate, and nobody should be ruled by every passing mood. But taught as a rule, and taught to people who have never had their feelings taken seriously to begin with, it becomes an instruction to ignore one of the most valuable warning systems they have that something isn't right. The tight chest during the sermon, the sinking feeling in the leader's office, the urge to get out of the room: these are exactly the signals this teaching tells them to dismiss.
Or take the practice of seeking counsel, which many charismatic churches encourage before any big decision. In itself this is sensible. Wise people ask for advice. But in some churches, it slides from asking for input into something closer to asking for permission, and the leaders being consulted are treated as having access to God's wisdom in a way ordinary members do not. Over time, this fosters exactly the credulity Fonagy describes. Congregants come to believe that the wisest advice and the most reliable knowledge come from the leader. Their own judgment is treated as secondary or suspect, and they learn to run every perception past someone else before deciding whether it is real.
Now think about what happens when someone in this kind of environment senses that something is wrong. The body notices first. Before you have a clear thought about a situation, your body has already responded: a tightening in the stomach, a pull to leave the room, a heaviness when a particular person walks in. These are your nervous system registering that something does not feel safe. But most people in high-control religious settings have never been taught to notice these signals, let alone take them seriously. They have usually been taught the opposite: that the body is unreliable and that what matters is what you believe, not what you sense.
In a person who trusts themselves, that signal would raise a question: What is this about? In a controlling church, it rarely gets that far. The person's first move is usually to dismiss the feeling as invalid. They tell themselves they are being oversensitive, or tired, or that they have misread things. If it persists, they look for reassurance, and the people they turn to are almost always inside the system: a spouse, a small group leader, a trusted friend from church, sometimes the leader themselves. What comes back is rarely a direct rebuke. It is more often gentle and ambiguous. "I'm sure he didn't mean it that way." "Have you prayed about it?" "He's under a lot of pressure at the moment." "Maybe God is using this to grow you." "Be careful not to let bitterness take root." None of these is unkind, and none of them engages with what the person actually noticed. The effect is the same. The person hears this from people they trust, weighs it against a feeling they have already half-dismissed, and concludes that the feeling must be wrong. The discomfort was real. It has simply been smoothed over, with everyone's help, until it counts for nothing.
After enough repetitions, people start doing this to themselves. They no longer need another person to talk them out of the feeling. They do it automatically, in the moment, before the feeling can even become a thought. The warning fires, and is switched off, and nothing changes.
Evan Stark, who studies coercive control in abusive relationships, has a word for this: perspecticide (Stark, 2007). It means the slow destruction of a person's ability to hold their own point of view. He was writing about abusive marriages, but the same thing happens in controlling churches, with one extra challenge. In a controlling church, the version comes with God's authority attached, and to doubt the leader feels like doubting God.
This is something that was done to you
The philosopher Miranda Fricker writes about a particular kind of unfairness that most of us never get taught to name. She calls it testimonial injustice (Fricker, 2007). "Testimony" here just means a person telling you what they know or what happened to them. Testimonial injustice is when that person is not believed, or is given less credit than they deserve, not because of what they are saying, but because of who they are.
An example makes it clearer. A woman goes to a doctor and describes severe pain. The doctor decides she is probably being emotional and sends her home. Months later a scan shows the problem was real all along. Her account was accurate. It was discounted because of assumptions about the kind of person she was, not because there was anything wrong with the account itself. The injustice is not just that she stayed in pain. It is that her standing as someone who knows her own body was taken away from her.
Fricker points out that this is not random. Who gets believed and who gets doubted follows the lines of power in a community. Some people carry what she calls a credibility deficit: their word is routinely discounted. Others carry a credibility excess: their word is treated as more reliable than it has any right to be, simply because of the position they hold.
Religious environments are often built in exactly this shape. In many churches, women's accounts are given less weight than men's, and this can be woven into the theology itself. A woman raising a concern about a male leader may find that her perception is treated as emotional, unsubmissive or spiritually suspect before it is even considered on its merits. Meanwhile, those in leadership positions, including pastors and clergy, carry a credibility excess. The pastor's reading of a situation is treated as authoritative. The elder's account of a meeting is the one that stands. A leader's assessment of your spiritual state is assumed to be more accurate than your own. When a member and a leader remember things differently, the leader's version is the one that becomes the record. This is not always deliberate. It is simply how the structure works, and it means that the people most likely to notice that something is wrong are also the people least likely to be believed when they say so.
Fricker then notices something that matters a great deal for survivors of spiritual abuse. When a person is treated this way over and over, they begin to do it to themselves. Imagine that same woman from the doctor's office, ten years later, feeling a new pain and thinking, "It's probably nothing, I'm probably overreacting," before she has even picked up the phone. Nobody has to dismiss her anymore. She has learned to dismiss herself first.
This is exactly what abusive religious environments train people to do. You were told, in many different ways and over a long time, that you could not be trusted to know your own experience. Your feelings were deceptive. Your questions were rebellious. Your discomfort was a sign of spiritual immaturity. Your reluctance to accept rebuke or correction was a sign that you were not submitted. And because these messages came wrapped in scripture and delivered by people whose credibility you had been taught not to question, you did not experience it as being dismissed. You experienced it as being corrected. So you took on the job of correcting yourself, and you did it faithfully, believing it was humility.
The value of Fricker's idea is that it names both the harm and what it leads to: being treated as an unreliable witness, and then coming to believe it. The problem was never that you were gullible. The problem is that you were placed, by the structure you belonged to, on the wrong side of a credibility gap, and you were subjected to a sustained pattern of having your standing as a witness to your own life denied. In time, you learned to deny it too.
How this plays out in practice
In controlling churches, ministries and cults, the erosion of self-trust rarely happens in one dramatic moment. It happens through ordinary interactions that follow a recognisable pattern. Some examples:
You raise a concern about a leader's behaviour and are told the real issue is your heart, or perception, or weakness. The conversation ends up being about your bitterness, your pride or your wounds, and the original concern is never addressed.
You report something a leader said or did, and the response is to ask what you might have misunderstood, or done to cause it, while nobody asks the leader the same question.
You feel uncomfortable during a prayer session, a deliverance ministry or an "accountability" meeting, and are told that the discomfort is the enemy resisting, or your flesh rebelling, or a sign that God is doing deep work. The bad feeling becomes proof that the process is working.
A decision you were about to make on your own is redirected to the leadership for approval, and when you go ahead without it, or hesitate, this is treated as a lack of submission rather than an exercise of your own judgment.
Your reading of scripture is corrected whenever it differs from the leader's, until you stop reading for yourself and simply wait to be told what a passage means.
A relationship, job or opportunity outside the group is discouraged as "not what God has for you," and over time you learn to check your own desires against the group's approval, and adjust the direction of your life accordingly.
Doubts and questions are met with concern for your spiritual state rather than engagement with the question itself. You learn that the safest thing is to not have questions.
Members who left are spoken about as deceived, bitter or fallen away. The message is clear: if you ever come to see things differently, that will be evidence of something wrong with you, not with the group.
In more extreme settings, your memories are directly contradicted. "That's not what happened." "You've misunderstood." "You're confused." "That did not happen." This is referred to as gaslighting (Sweet, 2019), and over time you stop trusting your own recollection of events and defer to the group's version.
Warmth, belonging and spiritual affirmation are given when you agree and withdrawn when you don't, so that trusting yourself starts to feel like risking the loss of everyone who matters to you. In psychology this is a basic pattern of reward and punishment (Skinner, 1953; Stark, 2007), and it is one of the most powerful shapers of behaviour we know of. When approval is inconsistent, given some of the time and withheld at others, the effect is stronger still, because the person keeps working harder to win it back. Over time you learn to agree first and check how you feel later, if at all.
In spiritually abusive environments, these experiences are repeated over months and years, and together they teach a person that their perception is not to be relied on, and that the safest course is to defer.
Why recovery matters
Often, in the years after leaving a spiritually abusive environment, a person gradually starts to realise that the things they sensed, felt and experienced were valid, and they regret not paying more attention to these things earlier. It would be reasonable to assume that this experience would make them less susceptible to similar dynamics and experiences. Unfortunately, people who have left spiritually abusive churches frequently find themselves drawn, sometimes quite quickly, into other relationships or groups with the same dynamics. This is not because they have learned nothing. It is because the underlying tendency to defer to others, and to doubt that their own experiences are real, remains in place, and may in fact have been strengthened by the abuse they went through. Those who exploit that tendency are often very good at recognising it. A person who has been taught to defer to spiritual authority is precisely the person an abusive leader will find easiest to draw close, and hardest to lose.
Schema therapy has a name for the deeper pattern that often sits underneath this. It is called the subjugation schema (Young, Klosko & Weishaar, 2003). A schema is a deep, long-standing way of understanding yourself and the world, usually formed in childhood and usually operating without your noticing it. The subjugation schema is the belief that you must give up your own needs, preferences and feelings in order to keep the peace, avoid anger or rejection, or hold on to relationships. People with this schema often cannot easily say what they want, and feel anxious or guilty when they try. They are drawn to confident, dominant people because deferring to them feels natural and familiar, and they are exactly the people that controlling environments recruit and retain most easily. This is also a schema that can lead to susceptibility to clergy sexual abuse and exploitation. Spiritual abuse reinforces this schema and gives it a theological justification.
This is why recovery is about more than processing what happened. It is about rebuilding the capacity that was undermined: the capacity to trust your own sense that something is wrong when that is the case. Then, the next time something feels wrong, the feeling is less likely to be suppressed and can act as a compass, guiding you towards more autonomous decisions. A person in recovery starts to be able to notice the orange flags and the red flags, to feel more sure that their unease means something, and to act on it in useful ways: asking someone outside the situation for their perspective, stepping back into a more observant position rather than rushing to comply, reducing the influence of people who do not feel safe, and leaving if they need to. Recovery does not mean never being drawn into a controlling dynamic again. It means being able to recognise it earlier and being able to trust yourself enough to do something about it.
What recovery looks like
Recovery from this kind of injury is slow, and cognitive understanding alone is rarely enough to shift tendencies that have been entrenched, often since childhood. Growth in this area happens by rebuilding, in small repeated steps, your standing as a witness to your own life, and by learning to trust that your feelings, your experiences and your sense of whether something is wrong are valid. Some of what that involves:
Noticing what is happening in your body and being curious about why. Start with the simple practice of checking in: what is going on in my body right now? Is my stomach tight, my jaw clenched, my breathing shallow? Do I want to leave? Many people from these environments have spent years overriding these signals, so at first there may seem to be nothing there. Keep checking. Over time the signals become easier to detect, and easier to detect earlier. Once you can notice a reaction, the next step is to get curious about it rather than judging it: why am I feeling this way? What just happened? Who was I with? The aim is not to decide straight away whether the feeling is justified. It is to treat it as information worth being interested in.
Building a track record. Looking back over past situations (with support in therapy if that is helpful) to find the moments when your body knew something was wrong before your mind was allowed to believe it. When you can see that your unease was accurate on several occasions, you have something solid to weigh against the next inner doubt or voice telling you that you are the problem.
Seeking outside support and advice. Talking to someone who is not part of the environment, whether a trusted friend, a family member, a psychologist or a leader from a different community, is one of the most useful things you can do. Controlling environments work partly by closing the circle so that everyone you consult has the same view. An outside voice often helps you name what you have been struggling to name yourself.
Treating advice as one piece of information, not the answer. Seeking input is wise, but no one else, however caring or well qualified, has the full picture. Often you are the only person who was in every room, heard every conversation, felt every shift and lived with the whole pattern over time. Other people can offer a partial view, and a valuable one, but it is still partial. People are also fallible. They have their own blind spots, loyalties and assumptions. So, what someone tells you belongs on the scales alongside your own thoughts, feelings and observations, not above them, and not necessarily with equal weight. Learning to weigh advice rather than defer to it is the difference between healthy trust and credulity.
Being realistic about what spiritual leaders are trained in. In many religious communities there is a habit of taking every kind of question to the pastor or minister: marriage difficulties, parenting, mental health, a child's behaviour, a friend's abusive relationship, a decision about a job or a move. Spiritual leaders are often treated as the wisest available counsel on all of these. Most are sincere, and many are genuinely wise. But it is worth remembering what their training actually covers. A theology degree is a serious qualification in biblical interpretation, teaching, church history and spiritual formation. It typically does not include much, if any, training in psychology, human development, trauma, family violence, mental illness or relationship dynamics; sometimes there is a single pastoral care or counselling subject. Some clergy hold additional degrees or have done further study in these areas, and their input may be well informed. But when a leader speaks with confidence about your mental health, your marriage or what a difficult experience means, it helps to ask whether this is something they are trained to assess or simply something they are willing to have an opinion on. Recognising the limits of a person's expertise is not disrespect. A good leader understands the limits of their own expertise and will refer the people they serve to outside support when a need falls beyond it.
Practising small acts of self-trust. Making minor decisions without consulting anyone. Stating a preference out loud. Disagreeing with someone in a low-stakes situation and noticing that the relationship survives. These are not trivial. They are the exercises that rebuild the muscle of self-trust.
Learning your own early warning signs. Getting familiar with how "something is wrong" shows up in your particular body: the tight chest, the wish to leave, the sudden fog, the urge to over-explain. These become reliable signals once you have learned to read them.
Choosing support people who welcome disagreement. The same wound that left you open to one authority can leave you open to the next, and a therapist, a new pastor or a kind friend can easily become the new source of truth. What actually heals is not being handed a better version of reality. It is being allowed to disagree and having that disagreement received as a sign of growth and maturity. Anyone helping you should see it as acceptable for you to push back.
Your sense that something was wrong in the spiritually abusive environment was accurate. Your body registered it, your feelings registered it, and your perception of what was happening was more reliable than you were led to believe. What was taken from you was not the ability to notice, but the confidence that what you noticed was real. That confidence can be rebuilt, slowly and with practice, until the next time something feels wrong, you take it seriously without needing anyone else to agree.
References
Campbell, C., Tanzer, M., Saunders, R., Booker, T., Allison, E., Li, E., O'Dowda, C., Luyten, P., & Fonagy, P. (2021). Development and validation of a self-report measure of epistemic trust. PLOS ONE, 16(4), e0250264.
Fonagy, P., & Allison, E. (2014). The role of mentalizing and epistemic trust in the therapeutic relationship. Psychotherapy, 51(3), 372–380.
Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E. L., & Target, M. (2002). Affect regulation, mentalization, and the development of the self. Other Press.
Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford University Press.
Skinner, B. F. (1953). Science and human behavior. Macmillan.
Stark, E. (2007). Coercive control: How men entrap women in personal life. Oxford University Press.
Sweet, P. L. (2019). The sociology of gaslighting. American Sociological Review, 84(5), 851–875.
Young, J. E., Klosko, J. S., & Weishaar, M. E. (2003). Schema therapy: A practitioner's guide. Guilford Press.
At Refuge Psychology, I offer evidence-based counselling and support for those recovering from religious trauma and spiritual abuse. My approach is collaborative and faith-sensitive. I will not attempt to change your beliefs but will support you in a way that is consistent with them. To learn more or to book an appointment, click here:
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Disclaimer: Any stories or examples provided are an example only and do not describe a specific client, person or event. Some of the information we provide on our website may be information related to health and medical issues, but it's not meant to be health and medical "advice". We provide this information for your general use only. While we try to provide accurate information, it may be historical, incomplete information or based on opinions that aren't widely held. Your personal situation has not been considered when providing the information, so any reliance on this information is at your sole risk. We recommend seeking independent professional advice before relying on the information we provide. Find the full terms of service here: Terms of Service | Refuge Psychology
