Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share Walk with Sue: Childhood Tragedy, Religious Addiction, Healing Community
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
Walk with Sue: Childhood Tragedy, Religious Addiction, Healing Community
Sue’s story offers us a glimpse of how tragedy can impact core beliefs. She internalized messages about herself and the nature of the world through her early childhood experiences. As a result she drew conclusions about how to survive the world as she understood it to be, which would later manifest as religious addiction and over-performance.
Childhood Tragedy
Three year old Sue ran into the garage where her father was cleaning a fish and leapt toward him yelling, "Catch me!" He turned with a knife in his hand, accidentally cutting Sue's arm—almost severing it entirely. She began to form a belief that somehow she had "been bad and disobeyed, and this was the consequence of it." In the 1960s, parents were not allowed to stay with their children in the hospital and Sue was required to be left alone. Sue internalized another message: "I'd better figure out a way to be pleasing and obedient enough or I will be abandoned or left alone."
Religious Addiction
As an adult with many layers of pain, including those messages from her childhood, Sue found ways of dealing with her pain by escaping through books, fantasy, and food. Sue committed herself to a life of over-performance and constructed a "false self" of religiosity.
Sue's journey led her to a place where she was finally able to confront her perfectionistic spiritual addiction. Her journey led her to a counselor who "swore like a sailor, smoked like a chimney, and absolutely loved Jesus." She also found the right medication to address panic attacks, and carved out time for inpatient psychiatric treatment. Sue described showing up to a treatment group in her dress, a gold cross around her neck, and large King James Bible in her lap. God used this group of people to show Sue how "people with authentic pain show up and tell the truth to one another." Sue didn't know what to do with that experience, but it started a trajectory of redemption in her story.
Healing Community
Constantly performing all the time to be accepted by a community only intensifies feelings of loneliness and alienates us from community. Being part of a community that is able to see the "cracks" of our stories provides healing to shame and false beliefs we have constructed our identities upon. Yet, the very thing that would enable healing, we also push away out of fear of being exposed and seen in our weakness.
Sue was invited into a group of community of eight women and this became a catalyst for significant transformation. Sue gained "sightedness" when she was able to see herself through the eyes of a loving community. When we see our own stories through the eyes of a compassionate community it enables us to change too. We are able to see ourselves with grace and truth and this enables growth.
Links
In this episode we mentioned the following resources:
Spiritual Sobriety by Elizabeth Esther is a book about overcoming religious addiction:
http://amzn.to/2p6nYve
Addicted to Religion, a conference talk by David Powlison:
https://www.ccef.org/shop/product/addicted-to-religion
Other resources:
Toxic Faith, by Stephen Arterburn and Jack Felton:
http://amzn.to/2oxBqKT
Religious OCD, a conference talk by Mike Emlet:
https://www.ccef.org/shop/product/religious-ocd
Music credits: "Mountain Drive" by Sea Sheperd, "Road" by Stephen Keech, "To realize" by Triads, "Stop Motion" by Triads, "Mischief" by Adrian Walther, "Dovely" by Adrian Walther, all courtesy of Soundstripe.
View all episodes
Sue’s story offers us a glimpse of how tragedy can impact core beliefs. She internalized messages about herself and the nature of the world through her early childhood experiences. As a result she drew conclusions about how to survive the world as she understood it to be, which would later manifest as religious addiction and over-performance.
Childhood Tragedy
Three year old Sue ran into the garage where her father was cleaning a fish and leapt toward him yelling, "Catch me!" He turned with a knife in his hand, accidentally cutting Sue's arm—almost severing it entirely. She began to form a belief that somehow she had "been bad and disobeyed, and this was the consequence of it." In the 1960s, parents were not allowed to stay with their children in the hospital and Sue was required to be left alone. Sue internalized another message: "I'd better figure out a way to be pleasing and obedient enough or I will be abandoned or left alone."
Religious Addiction
As an adult with many layers of pain, including those messages from her childhood, Sue found ways of dealing with her pain by escaping through books, fantasy, and food. Sue committed herself to a life of over-performance and constructed a "false self" of religiosity.
Sue's journey led her to a place where she was finally able to confront her perfectionistic spiritual addiction. Her journey led her to a counselor who "swore like a sailor, smoked like a chimney, and absolutely loved Jesus." She also found the right medication to address panic attacks, and carved out time for inpatient psychiatric treatment. Sue described showing up to a treatment group in her dress, a gold cross around her neck, and large King James Bible in her lap. God used this group of people to show Sue how "people with authentic pain show up and tell the truth to one another." Sue didn't know what to do with that experience, but it started a trajectory of redemption in her story.
Healing Community
Constantly performing all the time to be accepted by a community only intensifies feelings of loneliness and alienates us from community. Being part of a community that is able to see the "cracks" of our stories provides healing to shame and false beliefs we have constructed our identities upon. Yet, the very thing that would enable healing, we also push away out of fear of being exposed and seen in our weakness.
Sue was invited into a group of community of eight women and this became a catalyst for significant transformation. Sue gained "sightedness" when she was able to see herself through the eyes of a loving community. When we see our own stories through the eyes of a compassionate community it enables us to change too. We are able to see ourselves with grace and truth and this enables growth.
Links
In this episode we mentioned the following resources:
Spiritual Sobriety by Elizabeth Esther is a book about overcoming religious addiction:
http://amzn.to/2p6nYve
Addicted to Religion, a conference talk by David Powlison:
https://www.ccef.org/shop/product/addicted-to-religion
Other resources:
Toxic Faith, by Stephen Arterburn and Jack Felton:
http://amzn.to/2oxBqKT
Religious OCD, a conference talk by Mike Emlet:
https://www.ccef.org/shop/product/religious-ocd
Music credits: "Mountain Drive" by Sea Sheperd, "Road" by Stephen Keech, "To realize" by Triads, "Stop Motion" by Triads, "Mischief" by Adrian Walther, "Dovely" by Adrian Walther, all courtesy of Soundstripe.