What You're Carrying Has a Name

You were not the one it happened to. You may have never met the person it happened to. You may not have even liked the leader who did it.

And you are not okay.

This guide is for you. Not because what you are experiencing is more important than what happened to the person at the center of it, but because it is real, it has been studied, and almost nobody is going to hand you anything about it.

Why you are in a much larger group than you think

In 2008, researchers at Baylor University added questions about clergy sexual misconduct to the General Social Survey, a nationally representative survey of American adults. Alongside asking people whether it had happened to them, they asked something else. They asked whether people knew about it happening in a congregation they attended.

Eight percent of everyone surveyed said yes.

Work that into an actual room. In a four-hundred-person congregation, roughly seven people have experienced clergy sexual misconduct directly. Roughly thirty-two carry knowledge of it.

The care, when it goes anywhere, goes to the seven. The thirty-two are told the church is moving forward.

If you have been wondering why you feel this much about something that did not happen to you, part of the answer is that you belong to a group four times larger than the one anybody plans for, and nobody has handed you a framework or permission.

Why betrayal specifically does this

There is a reason this lands differently than other losses.

Jennifer Freyd, a psychologist at the University of Oregon, developed what she called betrayal trauma theory beginning in the 1990s. Her core observation was that harm done by someone you depend on operates differently in the mind than harm done by a stranger. When the person who hurt you is also the person you rely on for safety, belonging, or meaning, seeing the harm clearly threatens something you cannot afford to lose. So people frequently do not see it, or see it and set it down again.

Freyd and Pamela Birrell wrote a book about this called Blind to Betrayal. The central point is that the not-seeing is not stupidity and it is not denial in the moral sense. It is a protective response that makes sense given what is at stake.

That matters here for two reasons. It explains why you may have missed things that now look obvious in hindsight. And it explains why, when the structure finally gives way, the collapse is so disproportionate to your formal role in the story. You were not a bystander to an event. You were dependent on a system that turned out to be something else.

Six kinds of struggle

Psychologists have spent two decades developing a validated way of describing what happens to people spiritually when something breaks.

The Religious and Spiritual Struggles Scale was developed by Julie Exline at Case Western Reserve University with Kenneth Pargament, Joshua Grubbs, and Ann Marie Yali, and published in 2014 in Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. They built it across three samples totaling more than two thousand people, then confirmed the structure statistically. It has since been shortened, translated, and validated in several countries.

It identifies six distinct domains. They really are distinct: you can be in one and not another. Most people after something like this are in three or four at once, which is part of why it feels so disorganizing.

1. Struggle with God

Where were you. Why did you let this happen to people who were trusting you. Why did I not see it, when I asked you for discernment.

This one carries the most shame, because many people were raised to believe that anger at God is a failure of faith. It is not. It is one of the most common responses to betrayal by someone who spoke on God's behalf, and it appears throughout scripture in the mouths of people who were not being rebuked for it.

The particular difficulty is that the person who broke your trust was the person whose job was to represent God to you. Separating the two takes time and usually takes help. It rarely happens by deciding to.

This is the territory of the Despair to Hope pathway.

2. Struggle with meaning

Was any of it real. Were the sermons that changed my life worth anything if he was doing that the whole time. Did I build my life on something that was not there.

This is the domain that catches people off guard, because it reaches backward. It is not only about now. It retroactively puts a question mark over years of your life.

What tends to help: separating the source from the substance. If something true was said, it did not stop being true because of who said it. That is easier to write than to feel, and it usually takes months, not an insight.

This is the territory of the Bewilderment to Meaning pathway.

3. Struggle with people and institutions

I do not know who knew. I look at the elders and I wonder. I cannot walk into that building.

This is the most socially isolating of the six, because it puts you at odds with the community you would normally go to for support. The place you would take grief is the place the grief is about.

It is also the domain where the community's response matters most, and there is research on exactly that. Carly Smith and Freyd studied 345 university students and published the results in the Journal of Traumatic Stress in 2013. Among those who had experienced an unwanted sexual experience, the roughly forty-six percent who also reported that their institution had failed them, by making the experience more likely, by making reporting difficult, or by responding badly, showed measurably higher anxiety and dissociation than those who did not.

The institutional failure was doing its own damage, separate from the original event.

So if you find that you feel worse about the handling than about the incident itself, that is a documented pattern. It is not a failure of proportion on your part.

This is the territory of the Betrayal to Trust and Self to Community pathways.

4. Struggle with your own conduct

I defended him. I told someone they were being unfair. I noticed something once and said nothing.

This one runs underneath a lot of the anger that gets expressed in congregations after a disclosure. It is guilt about your own part, however small, and it is usually unspoken.

Something worth knowing: the Baylor researchers who interviewed forty-six people about how these situations unfolded found that observers consistently distrusted their own perception. The only available category for what they were seeing was "affair," and affairs are private business between adults, so they concluded they were being oversensitive.

You were operating with the categories you had. Almost everyone was.

This is the territory of the Reactions to Direction pathway.

5. Doubt

I do not know what I believe now. I do not know if I ever knew.

Of the six domains, this is the one the researchers treat differently. Elevated doubt does not automatically indicate distress. In the research, higher scores here can reflect a healthy process rather than a harmful one.

That is a real distinction and it may be worth holding onto. Questioning that follows a betrayal is not the same as losing your faith. Sometimes it is the beginning of a version of it that can survive things.

6. Struggle with evil

How could someone do this. What was actually happening in that room.

For some people this arrives as a preoccupation with the leader's motives and inner life. For others it comes as a broader fear about what is hidden in places that look safe.

The common outcome here is hypervigilance. You start scanning. Every new leader gets audited. That instinct is protective and it is exhausting, and over time it tends to cost you relationships you would have wanted.

What tends to help

Say it to one person who will not manage you. Not someone who will move you toward resolution. Someone who will let you say the ugly version. If that person does not exist in your congregation right now, that is common, and it is worth looking outside it.

Write it down before you decide what it means. People move faster toward premature conclusions when they have not put the thing into words. Writing is not processing. It is inventory. The processing comes later.

Resist the timeline. Communities in this situation almost always want to be finished. The pressure to be past it can arrive within weeks, sometimes from the pulpit. You are allowed to be considerably behind the announced schedule.

Be careful with forgiveness as an instruction. Forgiveness is a real thing and it is often part of where people end up. It is not a first step, it is not something anyone can require of you, and it is not the same as trusting someone again or as saying the harm was acceptable. When it is used to close a conversation, it is being used as a management tool, and you are allowed to notice that.

Decide about leaving on a longer clock than feels natural. Some people need to go and staying costs them. Some people leave in month two and grieve two losses instead of one. There is no right answer, but there is a wrong time to make the decision, and it is while you are in the worst of it.

Watch for the things that outrun this guide. If you are not sleeping, if you cannot work, if you are drinking more than you want to be, if the intrusive thoughts do not stop, this has moved past what a guide addresses. Talking to a licensed counselor is not an escalation and it does not mean you are worse off than other people. It means the thing is large.

One more thing

You may be carrying this quietly because you believe your version does not qualify. Someone else was harmed more. You have no standing. You should be supporting other people rather than needing support.

That reasoning is nearly universal in congregations after a leader's failure, and it is exactly why thirty-two people in a four-hundred-person room stay silent.

Grief does not require standing. What you are carrying is real, it has been documented, and it is not the same as what happened to the person at the center of it. Both things can be true.

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Sources referenced

• Exline, J., Pargament, K., Grubbs, J. and Yali, A. (2014), "The Religious and Spiritual Struggles Scale: Development and Initial Validation," Psychology of Religion and Spirituality 6(3): 208-222.
• Freyd, J., betrayal trauma theory; Freyd, J. and Birrell, P., Blind to Betrayal (2013).
• Smith, C. and Freyd, J. (2013), Journal of Traumatic Stress 26(1).
• Chaves, M. and Garland, D., prevalence research using the 2008 General Social Survey; and Garland and Argueta, qualitative study of first-hand accounts, 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.