061: Healing After Spiritual Trauma with Dr. Hillary McBride

What is spiritual trauma? How is it different from religious trauma? And what can I do if I, or someone I know, experienced it?

In this episode, we delve into the complexities of spiritual trauma and the healing process. Hillary and I discuss the importance of understanding spirituality, the role of the body in healing, and the challenges of naming traumatic experiences. And, we'll close with a practical exercise as Hillary leads us through a breath practice. 

Guest Spotlight ✨

Dr. Hillary McBride is a registered psychologist, a researcher, and podcaster, with expertise that includes trauma, embodiment, psychedelic therapy, and the intersection of spirituality and mental health. Her books include Mothers, Daughters, and Body Image, the bestseller The Wisdom of Your Body: Practices for Embodied Living, and the 2025 release Holy Hurt. She was the senior editor of the textbook Embodiment and Eating Disorders: Theory, Research, Prevention, and Treatment, which was published in 2018.

She has been recognized by the American Psychological Association, and the Canadian Psychological Association for her research and clinical work. In addition to being a teaching faculty at the University of British Columbia, she is an ambassador for Sanctuary Mental Health, and the host of CBC's award winning podcast Other People's Problems. Hillary makes her home in the pacific northwest in British Columbia, Canada. 

Website | Instagram | Threads

Links & Resources 🔗

• Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing by Hillary McBride | Amazon | Bookshop
• The Wisdom of Your Body by Hillary McBride | Amazon | Bookshop
• The Body Is A Doorway by Sophie Strand | Amazon | Bookshop
• Blind to Betrayal by Dr. Jennifer Freyd | Amazon | Bookshop
• I Shouldn't Feel This Way by Alison Cook | Amazon | Bookshop

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Episode Transcript 📄 

Hillary McBride
Bodies don't skip a step. What that means is they're more thorough than our culture likes to admit or acknowledge or prepare us for. When we have had to disconnect from our bodies, our bodies are faithful enough to our congruent healing, whole person process that they won't let us miss anything. And so what that means is if we've been disconnected from our bodies for years and we all of a sudden start paying attention, sometimes it's as if our bodies are saying, Hey, great. I'm so glad you're paying attention. Here are all of the things that you missed. Sometimes we can get flooded. And so the recognition that that isn't proof that our bodies are bad. That is actually proof that our bodies have been paying attention and aware and online the whole time.

Brian Lee
Hey, friends. Welcome back to the Broken to Beloved Podcast. If you're looking for practical resources for recovery from and safeguarding against spiritual abuse, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Brian Lee. As an ordained pastor and abuse survivor, I know what it feels like navigating life after spiritual abuse. I also know what it's like to want to prevent anything from happening to the people you know and love. It's why Broken to beloved exists. And we can't do this work alone. We need your help. Support our work by becoming a donor to help make our podcast and programs possible. Just head to brokentobeloved.org/support or click the link to donate in the show notes.

Brian Lee
We are celebrating one year of the podcast today! And in just one year, you've tuned in from all 50 states and 89 countries around the world. We just hit 40,000 downloads, and it's all because of you. We are so thankful to our listeners and for all of our guests who have come to share and offer their wisdom, insight, and expertise over this last year. This season, I'm looking forward to sharing more of these amazing conversations with you.

Brian Lee
We're kicking off Season 3 today with Dr. Hillary McBride as we talk about her new book, Holy Hurt. Hillary is a registered psychologist, researcher, and podcaster with expertise that includes trauma, embodiment, psychedelic therapy, and the intersection of spirituality and mental health. Her books include the bestseller, The Wisdom of Your Body and Practices for Embodied Living. She's been recognized by the American Psychological Association and the Canadian Psychological Association for her research and clinical work. In addition to being a teaching faculty at the University of British Columbia, she's an ambassador for Sanctuary Mental Health, and the host of CBC's award-winning podcast, Other People's Problems. Hillary makes her home in the Pacific Northwest in British Columbia, Canada. And now, here's my conversation with our new friend, Hillary. Hillary, welcome to the podcast.

Hillary McBride
Thank you for having me. I'm so happy to be here.

Brian Lee
It's an honor to have you. You read a lot of material in preparation for this book. A lot. You said, I think 100 academic articles, which is a marathon in and of itself. But then you to read 50 dissertations, 24 other books, the earliest of which you said was published in 1991. Was it The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse? Was it a different one?

Hillary McBride
I think that was the first one I read. Oh, good question. Yeah, good question at this point.

Brian Lee
Well, and I was surprised Why is it to find that it was published in the '90s? Because it felt like it could have been written today when I was reading that one. I'm wondering for you, after all this research, why was now the time for you to write this book?

Hillary McBride
Sometimes there are these inflection points where something becomes inevitable in a way. I was actually talking to some friends of mine, Kendra and Emily, recently, who were saying, You don't write a book unless you have to write a book. I've also heard Sophie Strand in her most recent book, The Body Is A Doorway, talked about writing is like this... I can't remember the word in the original language, but the rough translation is something like the gremlin. There's something that is just coming through. It just has to happen. It felt that way with this book. I've been writing and researching and talking in smaller settings and in media about spiritual trauma for a while now, probably eight or nine years. Yet there was something about listening to the Mars Hill, the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast that made me feel like, Oh, no. Oh, no. This is coming out of me. I think it was really like, just as a traumatologist, as a trauma specialist, as a trauma survivor, one of the things that is so important about trauma trauma is that it really betrays our perception of individualism in our culture, because all it takes is listening to one person's story told in the right way about the wrong thing that happened to them for our bodies to start feeling like, Oh, no, I feel unsafe now.

Hillary McBride
I'm remembering my trauma. I'm remembering the thing that happened to me. Trauma really is these invisible to the eye, to the naked eye, like spiderwebs that connect us to each other. I just I felt it listening to that podcast. I heard it from a ton of other people listening to the podcast that when we're hearing people name and articulate their stories of spiritual and religious trauma, but we don't have a framework through which to understand it or even recognize that that's what's going on, it's so appropriate for our bodies to start feeling scared and anxious and angry, and we don't know why. And so I'm really passionate about us being just creating resources around mental health literacy see, especially because in a lot of contexts where there has been religious abuse and spiritual abuse and spiritual trauma, people are often deprived of the information to make sense of why it hurts so much inside or why they feel so bad. It was really a combination of many, many years of interest and passion and experience and professional work to right to that point, though, of hearing that podcast and going, oh, I've got to say about this.

Brian Lee
Yes. And I think that podcast came out right around the same time I was dealing with my third experience of it, but the first time having language for it. And so like you're saying, hearing those stories was just such an alarm bell for me of recognizing, okay, it's not just me. I'm not crazy. I'm not alone. And also looking for the language because I was in my own counseling and therapy at the time and got the first word for religious trauma or spiritual abuse, which has got me down the rabbit hole of reading all the books and doing all the things. Language is so important. I'm curious why you choose in the book to call it spiritual trauma and not religious trauma. Is there a specific reason?

Hillary McBride
Yeah, I think that spiritual trauma is actually a more encompassing term for the hurt that happens across a variety of experiences, spectrums, locations, relationships. It comes back to the fact that at our Our core, we are spiritual beings. I'm not suggesting that we all are oriented towards religious experiences or religious communities, but spirituality, when we understand what it means, really takes us back to the core dimension of our humanness that propels us towards connection, towards meaning-making. If anyone has ever asked the question, Why am I here? That's proof you're spiritual. If anybody in the world has ever heard you listening to the podcast, has said, I want to belong wrong. Spiritual. If anyone has said, I want to make something, you're spiritual. Our creativity, our expansiveness, our expression, our longing for a relationship, our longing for meaning-making, those are dimensions of our spirituality. What we know is that if we are experiencing an injury that fractures our sense of innate goodness, our sense of trust in the world that makes us believe on some level that we are unsafe or we are bad, those experiences, whether they happen in encounters of sexual abuse or sexual trauma, even a natural disaster, those are impacting our spirituality.

Hillary McBride
When I use the term spiritual trauma, what I'm including is the way that there are injuries to our spirituality that can happen outside of a religious context that are extremely valid and legitimate. Actually, you probably saw this in the book, but the definition of trauma that I really like to use when it comes to spiritual trauma It is influenced heavily by Michelle Panshuck's work. She's a philosopher who's written about this. The idea is that spiritual trauma is anything that... It's a trauma that's caused by something a person closely associates with religion or spirituality or somebody who's a stand-in for the divine or is justified by spiritual practices or occurs because of religious or spiritual worldviews. But then in addition to that, the survivor believes that spirituality is somehow the cause or that there is a post-trauma response that's connected to spirituality, God, religion in some way. So what that means is, yes, there are traumas that happen inside our religious context, but there are also worldviews, ideas, meaning-making structures that religion hands us, that we're carrying with us through our whole lives, that are then impacting the kid who gets abused by the soccer coach.

Hillary McBride
What meaning are they making of that? And you might think, well, that's not religious abuse. It didn't happen in a church. It didn't happen in the hands of clergy. But if that child was given a story that says, If you suffer, it's because God is teaching you a lesson, and then that child ends up experiencing some suffering and their meaning-making structure around it, is that God is responsible for this, there is a word for that that might not fit within what we would call religious abuse. It's way broader than that.

Brian Lee
Yeah. It covers so much more. I appreciate that clarification. And I love that you connect spirituality to connection. I think you say, quote, Everything in our material bodies is telling a spiritual story, and there is no spiritual trauma that is not also physical, relational, and psychological, and vice versa. I love Alison Cook's contributions, both in the book and the podcast. She says, "We can't bifurcate the body from the soul, so all trauma is probably spiritual trauma on some level." And when she said that, when I was listening to the podcast, I was like, If that hit me. I was like, That's exactly it. There's nothing that it doesn't touch in a part of us. That's right. Like you're saying, wants to belong, wants to create, is asking, What is the meaning of it all? And so recognizing for people to be able to name that what happened to me is trauma on some level, and it happens on a spiritual level as well. To be able to make those connections and recognize what's been fractured or ruptured is the beginning of looking for or moving toward healing.

Hillary McBride
Absolutely. Yeah.

Brian Lee
I love that. Thank you. That's so helpful. So for people who aren't aware or are having difficulty finding a language to name their experience, how do you help?

Hillary McBride
Well, I think that it's how do we name something that we aren't even aware exists is like an interesting philosophical quandary. But what I could say is that I think when we are paying attention to our bodies, our bodies are always going to tell us information that It could potentially subvert power structures that are abusive to us or could tell us where the injury is, and can also tell us where the pathway to healing is. When I'm thinking about people who have a hard time putting words on what happened, I always like to come back to the body. I'm imagining that our bodies are saying all the time, This scares me. This hurts. I don't feel safe. This isn't okay. It's almost like our body can say with sensation what at times is unknowable to us through the realm of words. I think that it's interesting in spiritual context where there has been more higher instances of trauma or abuse is that people are often cut off from other people who can help them name their experience or put words to what's happening or give them information around it. It's a part of the systems, part of what makes these systems abusive and traumatic is that people are...

Hillary McBride
There's like such a poverty of education and language around the psychological aspect of the human experience, that there's almost like a deprivation of appropriate knowledge and insight. Because I think we could say, well, it's just like it's not been important to certain faith communities. But you could also look at it from a more Maybe like, sinister perspective to say it's really convenient to disconnect people from information that would otherwise make them critical of the system that they're in. You could say this is a particular abuse tactic is to deprive people of information that helps them think critically about what system they're in. But I just can't underscore enough how important it is to both have access to information about psychological development and access to relationships with people outside of the communities that we've been a part of, as well as to the beginnings of intimacy with bodily sensation. Like, what is my body saying? Because, again, that is also something that people are taught to mistrust. What I'll say, just this feels like a bomb to drop or like a pin to pull on the grenade sometimes. But to say, I think people who are disconnected from their bodies are much easier to control.

Hillary McBride
When we are disconnected from our bodies, and we learn to mistrust our bodies, and our bodies seem to be the proof of our bad, evil, sinful nature. Well, it becomes really easy to mistrust our body's cues that say, I'm scared. This doesn't feel safe, when actually that's the thing that would highlight there's some trauma here. This isn't feeling okay.

Brian Lee
That's so important. And I want to come back and ask more about the body in a second. But there's a quote right at the beginning of the book in terms of trying to name our experiences where you write, quote, after all, how do you pinpoint something that was woven into the very fabric of your development? How do you name a wound when the source of the trauma cut you off from knowing you were wounded in the first place? And you write about families of origin, and you write about systems theory and and so many other things that help us to look backwards to discover, sometimes for the first time with an awareness of what it is about our story or about our experiences growing up that has primed us for what we've experienced today. I think it's so helpful to know that when we are trying to name things or trying to identify and listen to our bodies that are trying to tell us, Hey, something's wrong here, to just be curious enough or patient enough to be curious and say, Okay, well, what What are you trying to tell me? Because we have been taught so often to spiritually bypass and to over-spiritualize things and to divorce our spirit from our body or from our feelings or that our heart is deceitful above all things and all these phrases that we pick up.

Brian Lee
I appreciate you saying that, like you're saying, it primes us for more abuse when we are divorced from our bodies. Yeah, you're so right. It's so helpful.

Hillary McBride
Yeah. Maybe I'll just say on that note, too, like One of the things that I encounter so much in my clinical work is people who know intellectually that they've been disconnected from their bodies and know intellectually, just enough to say, Yeah, this is something I want to be able to do. I want to reconnect to the body. But it is terrifying to do so. I like to think about bodies as holding... Bodies don't skip a step. What that means is they're more thorough than our culture likes to admit or acknowledge or prepare us for. And when we have had to disconnect from our bodies, our bodies are faithful enough to our congruent healing, whole person process that they won't let us miss anything. They won't let anything go unnoticed. And so what that means is if we've been disconnected from our bodies for years and we all of a sudden start paying attention, sometimes it's as if our bodies are saying, Hey, great. I'm so glad you're paying attention. Here are all of the things that you missed about every single time you felt terrified and all of the things that prove to you that you felt sad and not okay.

Hillary McBride
And so we start to reconnect to our bodily knowing. And what we meet is an overwhelming amount of sensation, of emotion. Sometimes we can get flooded. The recognition that that isn't proof that our bodies are bad. That is actually proof that our bodies have been paying attention and aware and online the the whole time and are really, really wanting for us to be able to integrate and make sense of all of the things that happened, including the things that don't have names but have a lot of feeling attached to them.

Brian Lee
Yeah, that's so helpful. You write, Our bodies need to know we are safe so that we can move forward without our coping strategies overwhelming us to the point where we're damaged not only by the initial trauma, but also by how we try to manage the pain of it. So how, when we are being flooded or when we've been denying or ignoring or repressing our bodily sensations for so long, how do we help our bodies to find and sense that safety?

Hillary McBride
Well, practically speaking, it's really good to know that we still have agency. One of the things that we don't learn in religious context is that we have a voice, that our voice can be worth listening to, that we can say no, that we can take breaks, that we can have boundaries. One of the things that I think is fundamentally missing for most people in terms of their psychosocial development in a highly controlling religious environment is the right and the access to the skill of saying no. What we can do as we're starting to pay attention to our bodies is recognize this might feel like a lot. I can take a break from this. I can shut this off. It's okay. It's okay to shut it off and then come back to it. When we look at it through the lens of somatic work, we would call that titration. It's the way that, this is a lot. We touch in on something and then move away from it. Boundaries, saying yes for a time, saying no for a time. I think relationship is essential for many of us. There has been, again, a deprivation of the absolutely vital experience of having another person who is not afraid of our emotion walk into our emotion with us.

Hillary McBride
There is a scholar, Diana Fosha, whose work I love. She's developed AEDP, which is one of the primary models of therapy that I use. What she has talked about in terms of the development of of psychopathology is that it emerges from the experience of unwilled and unwanted aloneness in the face of overwhelming emotion. The reality is that even though we were not allowed to share emotion or feel it or trust our body, it was happening the whole time. If we weren't allowed to stay in contact with it, but it was still happening, what that likely meant is that it was really alone inside of us, the things that felt scary, the longings, the desires, the anger, the sad. Being able to bring somebody in and say, climb into this with me might feel really scary and foreign, but is actually the thing that can make it tolerable. It's the thing that can make the emotion feel like Oh, whoa. Okay, somebody's got me even if I don't got me right now. So we have titration, we have relationship, attunement, attachment, all of these social resources that we can pull in. And then I think the even good understanding is important.

Hillary McBride
A But even just a way to say to myself, This is a feeling. It will not kill me. I like to say to people in my therapy practice, The thing that you're feeling, you've already survived. You already made your way all the way through it. You have survived it. Your body is just remembering, so giving it a sense of time and place. Like, Oh, this terror is not because I'm actually being abused or assaulted right now. The terror is my body remembering what it felt like at that time, but I did actually already survive. So it's safe to feel it now. The bad thing isn't happening again. So even just language on that, I think, can help us learn to tolerate it. It's really hard. I don't want to underscore or in some way, oversell the strengths of feeling your body without also realistically representing. This is really, really hard stuff to do and takes a lot of time. Yeah.

Brian Lee
So for people who are feeling flooded or lack the resources or relationships, because I hear from a lot of people in our community who talk about that sense of just utter isolation. I've been cut off from my community. I've lost my support system, whatever it is. You also write about feeling our feelings with the language of riding the wave, just letting them roll in. When we're sensing those things of either being flooded by emotions or unable to reach out to someone else, what is something we can do when we feel alone in that moment?

Hillary McBride
Bodies are full of resources. So bodies are not just full of emotion, that's terrifying to feel and full of the sadness and the pain of aloneness. Bodies are also full of wisdom and ancient insights that can support us through what's happening. For example, this comes from the practice of generative somatics as the spine as the long line of dignity. What happens when I think about the bones and the structure inside my body is holding me up? There is something of nature that exists inside of me that knows how to hold me in the midst of all of this. Even if it feels like I'm collapsing into a pile of nothing, my bones, they provide some structure from the inside. Or what about looking at my hands and recognizing that my hands look like my mom's hands? I'm at the age now when I look down at my hands, I see what I remember my mom's hands looking like when I was a kid. I looked down and I think, wow, I have a history of all sorts of people in my family, all All the women in my family had hands that looked like this.

Hillary McBride
They looked down and they saw their ancestors and their ancestors and their ancestors. What about even within my body? It's just a way of saying our bodies are not just bags of distress or trauma, the meat taxi that carries our brain around or this grab bag of trauma memories. There is so much more inside of our body or even things like breath. When I think about breath, breath for me has been this incredibly mystical experience which connects me to all living things, to think about breath as, wow, the thing that animates everything, all living beings breathe. Okay, here I am a part of the family of things. I think in spite of our loneliness, what we need to remember is all of the ways that we are held by our nonhuman kin, by land, by ancestors. There is something, I think, about our individualistic Western colonial world, which has really cut us off from the community of aliveness that exists in nature itself. There are times when I have been so overwhelmed with grief that I thought there is a There is no one and nothing that can know what this pain feels like. Then I've laid flat on my back in the ocean.

Hillary McBride
When I think about what that was like for me, it was as if the ocean was big enough to show me Look how much I can hold, look at how much I can contain. I'm not suggesting that, Okay, you're lonely, right? Go make friends with some trees. Great. That'll substitute all of your need for intellectual stimulation and community and who's going to bring you a meal when you're sick, don't worry about it. Make friends with trees. But I think that there is something about recognizing what are the ways that I'm not alone that can support us and scaffold us enough to be brave to build new connections and community, or that can help us take risks to let people in to see the vulnerable places inside of us. Because that can be part of building closeness is like, Oh, I need to take some risks here. And what's going to support me to take some risks? My bones and the Earth and my ancestors.

Brian Lee
Okay, I love that. I'm on a Robin Wall Kimmerer kick right now. Just finished Braiding Sweetgrass and then just finished Gathering Moss. And then I just listened to a podcast today with Ed Yong talking about An Immense World, which I think I read last year. And there is just so much happening around us when we take a moment to recognize that it's even there. And so much inherent interconnectedness with the land and everything that grows on it and the seemingly inanimate things like the rocks and boulders and the air and the things that are surround us. That same thing, I have very visceral experiences when I'm just outside with my bare feet on the grass. And it's such a simple reminder and profound, I think, reminder that I might feel isolated, but I am far from alone.

Hillary McBride
Exactly.

Brian Lee
And so I love that call and invitation to be reminded of that when we do feel isolated and alone. You take some time to outline some common factors that are more likely to cause spiritual and religious trauma, and these five Cs, right, of Control, Consequences, Compliance, Codependence, and Culture. For those who are listening who might not be sure if they've experienced spiritual or religious trauma, or they've just never been able to name it before. Would you share a little bit more about those five Cs?

Hillary McBride
Yeah. The five Cs are my way of summarizing what I've seen in my experiences, in the experiences of my patients, in what the research literature says about what happens in abuse of context. They're just as much about saying, Hey, these are some of the warning signs, as they are about saying, There are lots of reasons why you stayed so long. Because I think a question that I often hear from people is, if it was so bad, just a how question, How did this happen? What on Earth went on that I participated in this thing Then also hurt other people. Hurt myself, was hurt, stayed. How did it happen? So recognizing that there are all sorts of systemic factors that are at play, usually in these small micro moments that accumulate over time to create something that feels normal for us, like breaking it down and slicing it differently to figure out, Okay, what's going on there? I think is part of answering that why question. The first one, control, is a way of highlighting how much control is usually at the center of these abusive systems. Control is sometimes acquired because people accumulate control. They've been given power in some way, but sometimes it's taken and just assumed, or sometimes we hand it to people.

Hillary McBride
There can be lots of different ways that control is acquired or are being in a position where a person has that much power. How does that happen? There's lots of questions to be answered there. But I think the really important factor is that control is usually at the center of these traumatic context or these abusive religious spheres. That means that there is some power that's enacted over people that restricts certain ways that they live. Control is just as much about saying, this is who you need to be and this is how it needs to happen as it is about saying, you cannot be these things. These things are unacceptable. Who decides? Usually the person or the power or the system that's in control. Now, all of those rules about who you should be and who you shouldn't be really are meaningless unless there are some consequences that are provided for you. If someone just came up to me and said, Don't do this, I'd be like, No, Okay, you're not the boss of me. If somebody just decided to start telling me something really bizarre. If you go into your garden after five o'clock on Wednesdays, then everybody in your family is going to suffer eternally in a fiery pit.

Hillary McBride
It would be absolutely bizarre. But if someone says, That piece, these people that you care about are going suffer, all of a sudden, the control starts to make a lot more sense. So the consequences and the control are tied to each other. If we are told, here are the things about who you're supposed to be, what you're supposed to do, what you're not supposed to do, and here's what's going to happen if you don't follow the rules, and it's going to be scary. I mean, it could be scary now, it could be scary for eternity, it could be scary for you, it could be scary for people you love. That really hooks in the fear part of us. And as a species, we are deeply motivated motivated by fear and love. We are deeply motivated by belonging and what threatens our survival. If the consequences are about punishment to us, punishment to other people, real potential loss, you could be rejected from this community, and everybody you know is in this community. That's a pretty compelling consequence to keep us in alignment with what's expected. This is really into the next section of things, compliance I would say the codependents go hand in hand, where it becomes really, really hard to trust ourselves when we have been told by people in power that we are untrustworthy.

Hillary McBride
But that makes it really convenient for them to keep telling us the things that are true, the things that we're supposed to do. There's this, I'm going to go along to get along. I'm going to be part of what's expected of me in order to belong. But in doing so, actually, I learn I can't trust myself, and I have to trust you to tell me who to be and what to do. If I don't do that, then here are these consequences that I'm going to face. There's this, a colleague of mine, Dr. Preston Hill, talks about the connection between spiritual gaslighting and learned spiritual helplessness and outsourced moral authority. The connection between all of those things is if we are kept in a position of believing that we are helpless spiritually, and we are able to outsource to another person the authority over our lives, spiritually and otherwise, and what they tell us is that we can't trust ourselves, then it keeps us spiritually helpless. It keeps us deferring our spiritual authority to them, and they keep telling us, You're bad. You can't trust yourself. Those are the systems or the factors that undergird the compliance and the codependence.

Hillary McBride
This keeps me a part of a system, and it actually feels good. Maybe I belong. I'm doing it right. The strange thing is that in doing it right, you get to make the rules, and what you're doing is you're telling me that I'm doing it wrong. All of that is at play. Now, the larger thing to consider, and this might seem obvious to some folks, is none of this can go on unless it's situated in a culture where people are saying, Thumbs up, this looks We're doing it, too. You can even ask the question, How does clergy sexual abuse go on? How does it happen? How does a pastor or a rabbi or a guru of any sort abuse people who are devotees, who are congregants, who are community members? How is it happening at all? Well, usually there's a culture of silence or support around it. There's a culture that says, Oh, we can't question later. There's a culture that says, It's fine. Don't ask any questions. There's a culture that says, If I speak up, then I'm going to get in trouble, and I'm going to lose out, and I'm going to face the consequences, and I don't want to do that.

Hillary McBride
It's unusual for a person, a single person, to be experiencing harm in a system when there isn't also this incredible culture of condoning, supporting, allowing, silencing, ignoring around them.

Brian Lee
They're complicit. Yes, exactly. In maintaining that culture and not wanting to upset the status quo. I love that you mentioned the question of how did you stay so long or why did you stay so long? And I've been reading a lot this year about Betrayal Blindness and Dr. Jennifer Freyd, and Alison Cook talks so much about it in her book, I Shouldn't Feel This Way. It's just this immense shame that we take on ourselves and this blame that we feel because we stayed so long. And I love also the grace that she extends when it's recognizing the survival mechanisms that we've put in place to deal with the consequences that are far too overwhelming. And there's to allow for, of course you stayed. They were your only community. Of course you stayed at that job because it was your paycheck. It was providing for your family. Almost instantly when she said that to me, I felt the burden of shame go away because I had been carrying it for years of like, I don't know why I stayed. I don't know why I should have gotten out sooner. And just recognize that there is a kindness that we can extend to ourselves when we recognize these five five Cs and feel the weight of having stayed in that system and culture for as long as we did, that you're out now, or maybe you're finding the agency to remove yourself now, right?

Brian Lee
And so in an effort to move toward that, You also write about pre, peri, and post-traumatic factors, which I thought was so helpful, and I hadn't heard anyone else talk about yet. Would you just help us understand what that is a little bit?

Hillary McBride
In trauma world, I think it's a new conversation, as you're alluding to here in terms of religious and spiritual trauma. But in the neurobiology of trauma land, the traumatology conversation, pre, peri, and post-traumatic factors are what help us define why some trauma Why why some, what we could even say is stressors or acute events or stress events, why some of them go on to become stuck in the nervous system as trauma, whereas some of them, it seems, okay, that was a really stressful event. I I was able to move through it and integrate it. It feels like, yeah, I can remember, and it was scary, but it doesn't feel like it's living out in a way that's controlling my life in the present day. Again, trauma isn't just the bad things that happen. Trauma is also the way that the nervous system in the present is still telling the story as if we're back in the environment at that time, and there is a sense of it not being over inside of us. Pre-traumatic factors would be anything that happens before the trauma begins. When we look at it through the lens of a single incident trauma, let's just say 20-year-old female, car accident, what was it like in her life leading up to that car accident event?

Hillary McBride
How old was she? How many resources did she have? What was her community like? What was the story that she was given around suffering? How many positive attachment experiences has she had? What's her sense of belonging? Even things like age and sex and gender can play a role in as pre-traumatic factors. I'll say more about that in just a moment. Then we have peri-traumatic factors, which are what's going on at the time of the event. What we know, let's say for a car accident, is there's a before and there's an after. With all trauma, that isn't It's not a case. Sometimes with traumas, there's no before, there's no after. It's just a wasteland of terror. The peri-component is really significant when we're using language around trauma because the trauma world still likes to talk about things primarily as these what we would call index events. It's like a thing that happened, but what happens when your entire life was the thing that happened? But what we know in events in terms of peri-traumatic factors, when there are qualities of relationship that are involved in the trauma, did I get hit randomly by a log that fell in the woods, is going to feel different than if someone cut that log down and it hit me, versus if someone came after me, versus if someone I was supposed to be cared for came after me.

Hillary McBride
So all of the qualities of what happened at the time, what are our assumptions around that? Did I dissociate? Did I lose consciousness? Do I remember? Do I not? How long did it last? Those are some of the peri-traumatic factors. And then post-traumatic factors are what happened after. So again, let's think about 20-year-old female car accident. Does that young woman have a doctor that she can talk to? Does she go home to her family? Do they pick her up from the hospital? Do they I'm so sorry that happened. That should have never happened. How do we keep you safe? I'll step in. I'll take care of you. Or in the event of that experience, is she met with disbelief, judgment, blame? Is she alone? Does she have no time to go see a doctor? Does the doctor not believe her? Does her pain get worse? Does she not believe? All of the things that happen after. How it relates to the context of spiritual and religious trauma is, again, it would be really nice and convenient if we can put a timestamp on when the thing happened. But for a lot of people, the experiences of injury go right back to some of their earliest memories of being told, You're bad.

Hillary McBride
You're sinful. Here's proof of it. Then we can look at how trauma stack on top of each other. Let's just say that that's the peri or the pre-traumatic factor is also the peri-traumatic factor for something else. Then they experience an event later in life and they believe like, Oh my gosh, I'm to blame. I'm bad. I'm the reason why. Or they tell people about the thing that happened and their community says, We'll just pray about it, or God gave you this so you could join in Christ suffering. Just the awful things that we tell people who are suffering. The pre-peri and post-traumatic factors are a way of explaining why does some stuff stay stuck, and sometimes it doesn't. But they're also a way of highlighting that for many people, there was no clearly defined before and after. It's just one thing after another that accumulate into what feels like terror, dissociation, shame, just all of the things that live inside of us. And it's part of my argument in saying that I think almost all spiritual trauma is complex trauma because there's no before, there's no after. It's injury after injury after injury.

Brian Lee
That's helpful. If there's a resource I'm looking for to learn more about that, what would you recommend?

Hillary McBride
I write about it a little bit in The Wisdom of Your Body. Most of that comes It's from, I would say, deep doctoral work in the fields of traumatology. So there aren't too many resources that I'm aware of that are related to that. But I'm guessing if you post this and someone knows of something that they can get in touch with you or they can share it.

Brian Lee
It's fascinating. And I'm always wanted to learn something about it. I do appreciate, again, the care and the nuance around language. And towards the end of the book, you write that the word healing can even sometimes be haunted by the language of being healed, that we've so often defined healing as something going away. And so you offer these other options like recovery or remaking, which comes from the trauma community. And then you write, Instead, healing is the ability to attend to whatever is hurting, to turn toward where the injuries are, and patiently, with courage and clarity, let them be loved, and eventually to love them ourselves as they are. Tell us about what healing or other they're alternate words now, mean for you or look like for us in the context of that idea.

Hillary McBride
Yeah. Healing is such a weaponized word in religious spaces, right? Because it's often used as proof of compliance, and that's where it gets really tricky. If you were healed, if the thing that hurt no longer hurts, if the injury is gone, if the disability no longer exists, then it's proof that you were good and you did what we told you to do. So healing can feel like such a complicated word, which is part of why I think it's especially important to be tentative with it in this space. And in addition to that, I think healing, it doesn't really account for what is often experienced by complex trauma survivors, trauma survivors, that there is no such thing as the thing that happened ever going away. There is no life in which you forget about it, where it is not part of what shapes your everyday motivations, passions, fears. I think it's important to recognize that there is actually no going away of anything that's ever happened to us, ever. Every time I've had a wonderful meal and it's shaped my interest in eating that food again, or I've gone on a trip and I've had an experience and it exposed me to something wonderful and beautiful, that has also changed me.

Hillary McBride
There's no going back to before that, even of the beautiful things. And so recognizing that this narrative of healing has really been coopted by the control in those communities. I think we need to see something that's more complex here when we're talking about healing, especially if we're trying not to co-opt healing through the lens of ableism, because there are many things in our world that culture or church has said are bad, but actually are just part of the varied and complex and beautiful experience of being human. When I think about healing and what it means to me and the definition that I want to move towards. Really, I'm not done with the word yet. I'm not done with the word. I'm not throwing the word out. I think we need to rehabilitate it. I often say we need to heal our relationship to the word healing. That it means building a new way of relating. Actually, my understanding of healing comes from my understanding of what trauma is. Trauma means wound in the original Greek. When I think about a wound, I think about something that gets pulled apart or fractured or separated. And if the injury is the separation, then maybe the healing is the connection.

Hillary McBride
Then maybe the healing is the bringing together. It's the turning toward. So is it possible for us to experience healing in the presence of things that won't go away? Absolutely. But what does that look like? Maybe it's not that it goes away or that we go away from it. Maybe it's that we actually go towards it. Maybe the thing that remains is something that we become in relationship with. So a good example of this would be, okay, I I still have places inside of me that feel like relics of really harmful religious environments. Sometimes they pop up and they surprise me. Am I going to try to rid myself of them and send them away and banish them? Well, maybe, but that actually doesn't prove to me that anything is really different. I'm just replicating inside of myself what was always modeled to me in those communities. So what could healing look like if not sending away? Maybe when it means I learned to love those places, the places that I was told are bad or dangerous or sinful. What if I am in relationship with them? What would happen if I actually if I wrapped my arms around them and said, You get to belong here, too.

Hillary McBride
I understand you, and I want to listen to you, and I want to take care of you. That could be something we do with younger parts of us, but that could also be something we do with the versions of us that are still carrying the terror of the traumas that we've lived through, the parts of us that feel scared and wake us up screaming in the middle of the night or give us the nightmares, or give us the the overwhelming freeze response. There is something inside of us that actually, in referencing our conversation earlier about nature, is like the ocean that can be wide enough to surround and hold the places that are full of terror to say, You can tell me how scared you were for as long as you need to, and I will listen. I will not stop listening. I will not send you away. You can be scared, and I'll be here listening to every bit of And what would it look like if instead of creating more exiles for ourselves, that we move towards this integration of all these broken, wounded parts?

Brian Lee
I love that you mentioned that we can't heal from control by controlling what healing looks like. I love that whole section. You say we don't mend the wounds of perfectionism by trying to do it perfectly and all these other pieces. How do we catch ourselves and grow in this awareness of our own white knuckling our way through things and move toward that acceptance that makes space for different habits to form that aren't so controlling?

Hillary McBride
Because our defense mechanisms, they've been trying to help us, but they often do the opposite. I think for me, a big piece of this has been recognizing that when I'm in these certain kinds of zones, there are sensations and postures and embodied qualities to them. But when I am approaching something rigidly, I often feel the rigidness or the tightness in my body. There can be cues outside of our thinking or our meta-reflection that indicate, Hey, you might be doing it the same we always did. You're gripping that really. Quite literally, you're journaling, but you're gripping your pen super tight or your shoulders are tight. I'm always coming back to the body. Is there flexibility in my body? Is my body feel soft and available to flex, to adapt, to adjust trust around this. That might tell me that I'm actually able to do that cognitively as well. I think, I don't know if we can do any of this alone. I don't know if we can do it alone. And so pushing ourselves to read material that stretches us out of one way of thinking, hearing different points of view, having friends speak into us.

Hillary McBride
Are you seeing or even therapists, a question that I get asked a lot and that I like to dig into is, how is your approach to healing replicating the pattern of dysfunction? We would call that a parallel process. Have you actually just taken the same pattern over here that was used to hurt you? And are you doing that, but you put some different language on it? Now I'm deconstructing, but with the same rigidity and force and in out and ask them mentality, like, Oh, I can see some parallels. Sometimes we can't see those on our own, but having other people help us can be useful. But recognizing if that's the thing that hurt me, the perfectionism, what's the alternative? Like a flexibility, creativity, the gray, the not knowing, okay, what would it look like to actually espouse that in my relationship to myself? It might sound like this. It might sound like, I don't have to know. Okay, so I can say that to myself. I don't have to know. Or it might sound like, I don't have to do it perfectly. There is such thing as good enough, finding language that starts to form a new groove.

Hillary McBride
But I wish I could say that there was a way to do this without the body, because I think that would be a lot easier for some people. The truth is, our body These really have so much to say about how to be flexible, creative, expressive. I really can't think of anything outside of therapy or psychedelics that has been as helpful for me in this process as dance, to move to move my body in unstructured ways, to let my body get connected to rhythm, because there's something about, and not even choreograph dance, but nonlinear, ecstatic, authentic movement. I'm like, Whoa, my body knows how to not do things perfectly. Actually, it can feel like a hell of a lot of fun. When I connect with the pleasure of doing it imperfectly and the creative expression that comes along with it, and I connect to more parts of myself, I realized my body knows the way to do the integrating journey without it reinforcing some of those systemic factors all along that were there all along.

Brian Lee
I would love to end with that. I came across you because of your body-based approach, which I so love and appreciate. And there are so many great practices in your book. And would you be willing to lead our listeners through some exercise that they can do with their body as they're processing all of this?

Hillary McBride
Yeah, absolutely. So I'll share one, and then we can do one together. The one that comes to mind just in light of what we were saying is to put shape to what's inside. Sometimes there are places inside of us and in our stories that have no words, but we can connect with them. And so as you're listening to the conversation, is there something that stands out for you? Then if you were to take that something that stands out to you and give it a shape with your body, what shape would that be? That's the prompt for listeners. I'm sure I'll do it later today. I'm often making shapes like, Oh, this is how it feels, and you could do that too, Brian. But the thing that will lead us through here that I think in line with our relationship with nature focus in this conversation is I'd love to lead us in a little moon breath exercise. If it feels good for you, Brian, and I'll do this, and anyone who's listening along, you're welcome to close your eyes as long as you're not driving or on the treadmill or something like that. You can always pause this and come back to it later.

Hillary McBride
Just as you move your body into a position that feels sturdy and supportive. I just invite you to notice that you're breathing. As you're breathing, you might begin to separate your body or your breath into four quadrants. You might notice the inhale, and we'll call that waxing. You might notice the point at the top of your breath that feels really full. It's often something we don't give a lot of attention to, but there's actually a space right there at the top, and we'll call that the full. Then there's the exhale, which we'll call the waning. Then there's that spot at the very bottom between the exhale and the inhale, and we'll call that new. And just see as we travel around the breath as if it's a cycle itself. You can notice each of those four different sections, recognizing the power of the full, the bursting, the expansive, maybe even the pressure that comes with it, and what seems like the nothing or the empty that's in the new, that space where it seems like nothing's happening. It could be an ending, but it could be a beginning. Just as you travel around the cycle of breath a few more times, my invitation for you is to start to notice which one resonates with you.

Hillary McBride
If you felt drawn to one of them, just giving yourself over to that without even having to come up with a reason for why, just noticing your body is leading you towards some something that feels good or is doing something. Recognizing that that one thing you're drawn to is actually part of the family of all of the phases, that they're all actually happening at every moment inside of you. And in this way, your body is like nature. There is a rhythm inside of you. There's a cycle inside of you every single moment as you take a breath that mirrors what's happening outside of you. It's such an important reminder of our not aloneness. When you think about these moments of feeling like, Am I the only one who's grieving, who's letting go, whose heart is breaking? Your exhale reminds you that trees are doing that all the time. The moon is doing that all the time. The ocean is calling the waves back towards herself away from the shore. That moment where it feels like, Am I alive? Am I dead? Is this the beginning? Is this the end? Nothing's happening. Why is nothing happening?

Hillary McBride
You can remember that new moon space, that pause. And the inhale, the place where things are generating or beginning or growing, that's always available and alive inside of you. Nature knows that, too. And then that full, it's like, Oh, there's There's so much I can barely hold it. I'm going to burst. I feel like I'm going to explode or like, wow, wow, wow, everything is in bloom. That part of your breath reminds you that nature knows that, too. That's inside of you and outside of you. And then we'll just take one more trip around the cycle and we'll come back to what's happening here.

Brian Lee
Thank you so much.

Hillary McBride
You're welcome.

Brian Lee
Hillary, if people want to find you or connect with you, where can they look?

Hillary McBride
Yeah, so you can find me online on my website, Hillary L. McBride. I've got some resources on there and links to books and things like that. Also, events that I have coming up, I usually post there on Instagram, and it's probably where I hang out the most, and Facebook and Threads and things like that. @HillaryLiannaMcBride is my handle. And hopefully, if we haven't met, we'll see each other at some point in the future. All of your listeners, please come say hi if we're ever on an event. We just want to put a face to a name. I'd love to get to know you and see there.

Brian Lee
Thank you so much. Everyone, go get a copy of Holy Hurt wherever books are sold, we'll have the links for everyone in the show notes. Thank you so much for being with us today.

Hillary McBride
Thank you for having me.

Brian Lee
What an incredible conversation. I'm so grateful for Hillary and for the work that she's been doing these past several years. If you enjoyed this as much as I did, be sure to follow Hillary and say thanks for being on the show. You can find links and all the things in the show notes. Coming up on the show this season, we have David Gate, Becky Castle Miller, Zach Lambert, Dr. Arielle Schwartz, and so many more. Next time, we'll be talking with Cara Meredith about her new book, Church Camp. Subscribe or follow the show to get new episodes automatically. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and review or share with your friends. It really helps us to grow and continue providing quality content for you.

Brian Lee
And thank you to everyone who made this show possible through their financial support. We truly couldn't do this work without you. Consider a donation today at the link in the show notes. This episode was hosted and executive produced by me, Brian Lee. Editing by Heidi Critz. Thanks for taking the time out of your day to listen. I hope it's been helpful. Here's to moving toward healing and wholeness. Together. I'll see you next time.