After The Fall · The Feelings Nobody Says Out Loud

In any congregation after something like this, there is a set of feelings that come up in almost everyone and get said by almost no one.

They stay quiet for the same reason each time. People believe that having the feeling reveals something bad about them. So they hold it privately, decide they must be the only one, and the silence makes the next person just as sure.

Here are five of them. None mean what you are afraid they mean.

1. You still miss him

You have real memories that are now unmentionable. He said something at your father's funeral that you have never forgotten. He showed up at the hospital. He was funny. He was, for a period of your life, the person who explained God to you in a way that finally made sense.

And now you cannot say any of that out loud, because saying it sounds like defending him, and it might genuinely hurt someone who was harmed.

So you carry a grief you are not allowed to have, on top of the anger you are allowed to have.

What this is. Ambivalence. Conflicting feelings held at the same time about the same person.

Pauline Boss, whose research is on losses that never resolve cleanly, treats normalizing ambivalence as one of six core things that help people live with this kind of loss. Not resolving it. Normalizing it. Her point is that in a genuinely contradictory situation, contradictory feelings are the accurate response, and the pressure to pick one is what does the damage.

You are not required to decide he was entirely a fraud or that the good was fake. Both things happened. Both are yours.

What helps. Say it once, to one person who can hold it, and specifically not to anyone who was directly harmed. That is not because your feeling is shameful. It is because they are carrying enough, and this is not theirs to absorb.

2. Part of you is relieved

Relieved it is finally out. Relieved you do not have to go on Sunday. Relieved that a person you were vaguely uneasy about for years, in a way you could never justify, is gone.

And then, immediately, ashamed of the relief. Because people are devastated and a family is destroyed and here you are feeling something that resembles lightness.

What this is. Usually one of three things, and it is worth working out which.

Relief that the tension ended. Situations like this generate an enormous amount of low-grade unease before they break, and the breaking ends the unease. Relief at the end of a strain is not celebration of what caused it.

Relief that you were right. If you had a feeling you could never name, the disclosure returned your judgment to you. That is a real thing to be relieved about.

Relief at being released. If church had become an obligation you could not figure out how to leave, this ended it. That says something about what your situation had become, not about your character.

What helps. Notice that relief and grief are not competing. Most people feel both and interpret the presence of relief as evidence the grief is not sincere. It is not evidence of anything except that more than one thing is true.

3. You feel nothing

Everyone around you is crying or furious, and you are flat. You went to the meeting. You heard the statement. You made dinner. You feel about the same as you did last month.

And you have started to wonder whether that means you never really cared.

What this is. Almost never indifference.

Numbness is a common response to something too large to take in at once. Research on institutional betrayal has found elevated dissociation among people whose institutions failed them, and dissociation at the mild end looks exactly like this: flatness, distance, a sense of watching from slightly outside.

It is also sometimes just sequencing. Some people go numb first and feel later, months later, at an inconvenient time, in response to something small.

What helps. Do not conclude anything about yourself from it. Do not force feeling by consuming more details, which mostly produces agitation rather than grief. Keep the ordinary structure of your life going, because that is what you have, and let it arrive when it arrives.

If the numbness is total and persistent, extends to things unrelated to church, and lasts months, that is worth talking to a counselor about. Not because you are broken, but because that pattern responds well to help.

4. You resent the people who seem fine

They are singing. They have moved on. They are talking about the future of the church with what looks like genuine enthusiasm, and you want to shake them.

Or the reverse. You have processed it and you are ready to move, and there is a group still relitigating it every week, and you resent them for holding everyone in place.

What this is. A congregation moving at different speeds, which is guaranteed, because people are at different distances from the event, have different histories with the leader, and had different amounts already loaded onto them before this happened.

The resentment is not really about pace. It is usually about validation. Someone moving fast can feel like they are saying the thing was not that bad, and someone moving slowly can feel like they are saying you never cared enough.

Neither is generally what is meant.

What helps. Assume difference in position rather than difference in loyalty. The person who seems fine may be numb, may have been less attached than you, or may be falling apart privately at a time you never see. The person still angry after a year may have known something you did not.

This is also the resentment most likely to split a congregation permanently, so it is worth being deliberate about.

5. You do not think you have the right to feel any of this

Other people had it so much worse. I was not close to him. I have no standing. I should be supporting people instead of needing support.

This is the most common one on the list, and it is the reason the other four stay silent.

What this is. Grief researchers have a term for it. Kenneth Doka described disenfranchised grief: grief that is not socially recognized or sanctioned, where the person grieving concludes they have no permission to be grieving at all.

Some losses come with permission and a casserole. Others come with nothing, and the person carrying them decides they must be overreacting.

Here is a number worth having. When researchers at Baylor University added questions about clergy misconduct to a nationally representative survey of American adults, they asked not only whether it had happened to people but whether people knew about it happening in a congregation they attended. Eight percent said yes, against about three percent of women who reported experiencing it.

In a four-hundred-person church, that is roughly seven people who experienced it and roughly thirty-two who carry knowledge of it. The care goes to the seven, when it goes anywhere at all. The thirty-two are told the church is moving forward.

You are not on the edge of this. You are in the largest group in the building.

What helps. Stop auditing whether your suffering qualifies. Grief does not work on a standing requirement, and treating it as a scarce resource that the most-harmed person has first claim on does not actually help that person. It just produces a room full of people pretending.

The common thread

Every one of these gets held privately because of a conclusion the person drew about what having the feeling says about them.

Missing him means I am not taking it seriously. Relief means I am callous. Numbness means I never cared. Resentment means I am petty. Needing anything means I am self-centered.

None of those conclusions follow. They are all the same move, which is treating a feeling as a verdict.

The feelings are information about a genuinely disorienting situation. They are not a character assessment, and the fastest way to find that out is to say one of them out loud to one person and watch them say yes, me too.

When this is more than a guide can hold

Numbness that is total, persistent, and spreading into the rest of your life
Not sleeping, or not working, or drinking more than you want to be
Intrusive thoughts that will not stop
Any thought of harming yourself

Talking to a licensed counselor is not an escalation. It means the load is bigger than a document.

Sources

Boss, P., on ambiguous loss and the intervention guideline of normalizing ambivalence.
Doka, K., on disenfranchised grief.
Smith, C. and Freyd, J. (2013), Journal of Traumatic Stress 26(1), on elevated dissociation associated with institutional betrayal.
Chaves, M. and Garland, D., prevalence research using the 2008 General Social Survey, Baylor University School of Social Work.

This guide is educational and is not a substitute for counseling or medical care. If you are in crisis, contact a licensed professional or call or text 988 in the United States.