Spirituality Classroom Blog
Three Definitions of Spiritual Abuse
I’m surprised that I continue to run across any number of people who don’t know what spiritual abuse is and, in fact, have never heard of it. I suppose I’m surprised because I’ve dealt with it for so many years in my personal struggle, it seems that everyone else would also know what it means. Clearly that’s not the case. Apparently there are church members for whom “church” means only something positive and good.
Therefore, those of us who have experienced spiritual abuse in churches must be a subset group of “everyone else.” Even among that subset, there are folk who don’t know to call the traumatic events done to them – they don’t know to call that trauma by the phrase “spiritual abuse.”
So what is spiritual abuse? If so many people don’t know what it is, then I must begin my blog by attempting to define it. Barbara Orlowski, in her book, Spiritual Abuse...