Just as God’s people are beautifully different, our healing journeys are varied and unique. The wounds we experience are deep, and they are often connected to past trauma, so the pathway toward health is layered, long, and complicated.

First, to heal, you’ll most likely need to separate from the ministry or church that has hurt you. To try to heal in the abusive environment is like pouring bacteria directly into an open wound. First you must seal the wound (leave the place of injury) and keep away from contaminants to let the wound heal, scab over, and fade. Separation is a healthy part of the healing process.

Working through your healing may also require understanding the concept of moral injury, a term associated with PTSD and first coined for those returning from war. Psychology Today defines it this way: “Moral injury is the social, psychological, and spiritual harm that arises from a betrayal of one’s core values, such as justice, fairness, and loyalty.” If you were harmed in a ministry setting, and that injury or coercive control caused you to violate your conscience, you have experienced a moral injury.

When I worked for a Christian company and was asked to lie to their clients about pricing (in order to take advantage financially of the clients), I felt the pressure to conform. Sadly, initially I did. Eventually I resigned, but then I had to face the moral injury of the harm I had done to others, making amends, and figuring out why I had capitulated. Members of high–control churches may also feel responsible for the people they invited to come to that church—and some of those “recruits” might end up staying, furthering the guilt.

Working through moral injury or any other injury incurred in an abusive ministry environment involves the biblical practice of lamenting. Throughout the psalms, we see songs of lament, where the psalmist recounts in stark terms all that they are questioning and stressed about—without any filter. With raw honesty, we can share our lament with the God who is unsurprised by our outburst. In the lament psalm structure, the psalmist begins with complaint, but works through that pain and ends with a newfound trust in God. We cannot get to the trust part without honesty first.

Another important aspect of the healing journey is to recognize this difficult truth: what wounds you is what heals you. A relational wound requires a relational cure. If you have been injured in an unhealthy community, the pathway to healing comes from stepping a little toe into the pool of a healthy community. This is not easy because we used to think our church to be a safe place, only to find it deeply unsafe. We worry that we won’t discern well, so in protection we wall ourselves off from others, thinking that will prevent pain. It will, but it will also prevent healing. We need other people. As my husband and I have walked through church bewilderment, it’s been our new community who have stitched us back together—slowly.

If you keep your church hurt story to yourself, you will not heal. As I’ve often told audiences, “an untold story never heals.” This involves finding a group of safe people to share your pain with so that they can shoulder your story, and it is no longer festering inside you, running rampant. A great resource to help you find those safe people is Safe People: How to Find Relationships that Are Good for You and Avoid Those That Aren’t, by Drs. Henry Cloud and John Townsend. If you’re still terrified to let out your story with someone, consider writing it down or dictating to your phone just to get it out of your brain.

Part of healing is realizing that the people who hurt you are not the same as the God who loves you and sacrificed himself for you. Dr. Diane Langberg writes, “We forget that anything done in the name of God that does not bear his character through and through is not of him at all. In our forgetting, we are more loyal to the words of humans than to the commandments of God.” The few need not define the whole.

In separating others from God and his ways, we can look at how Jesus interacted with the woman at the well in John 4. As a despised, repeatedly remarried Samaritan woman, she was a wounded, broken, and in need of living water. Jesus didn’t chastise her, shame her, or humiliate her. While she had most likely been wounded in community (having had five husbands and one non–husband), Jesus alone offered her vitality apart from those who wounded her.

Similarly, Jesus asked the man who waited for the stirring of the waters an important question. “Would you like to get well?” (See John 5:1–17 for the story). Although the man didn’t directly answer his question, Jesus, in his compassion, healed the crippled man anyway. As we navigate the choppy waters of church hurt, I believe Jesus asks us the same question. Part of our healing journey is recognizing we need intervention, and then truly longing for that healing. While it is good and right to lament and name our injuries, we cannot stay in that place forever.