Tiffany

“We teach people to hate their humanness and praise them, calling it righteous because we believe got hates their humanness too. We offer people chronic guilt, shame and fear of hell and celebrate them as signs of spiritual maturity.

We stoke in people an inner critic and tell them it’s the voice of god.”
― Hillary L. McBride, Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing

“When are an adult if we have had a secure and safe upbringing and healthy relationships, someone telling us that we are bad might sting or cause confusion or it might strike us as outright ridiculous.

But if someone tells a child the same thing as their world is developing and they lack any other frame of reference, the words shape their development from that point on.”
― Hillary L. McBride, Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing

“The hero child is groomed from childhood to have the pressure of eternity placed on their shoulders. The souls of others become their responsibility. Ingenerating and venerating a compulsive drive to rescue.”
― Hillary L. McBride, Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing

“For a lot of my students and clients the biggest spiritual belief they have that they have a hard time letting go of is that they are bad. It’s a kind of learned spiritual helplessness and they’ve learned to outsource their spiritual or moral discernment to a spiritual authority...

… Then some people say, hold on this is weird. There is this nudging process of spiritual exploration where they eventually realize “that was silly, I’m not spiritually evil, my intuitions for flourishing are good.” Then they come to this new level of satisfaction. But a lot of times their spiritual and religious communities can’t hold that kind of growth. That is a disorientation of its own. They end up becoming spiritually exiled. They have to find new communities.”
― Hillary L. McBride, Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing