Embodied Healing, Spiritual Trauma, and the Journey Home to Your Body with Dr. Hillary McBride
Episode Notes
This week, I’m joined by someone whose work has profoundly shaped my own healing journey—Dr. Hillary McBride. A psychologist, researcher, author, and speaker, Hillary is a leading voice in the integration of embodiment, spirituality, and trauma recovery. We discuss her personal story as well as themes from her powerful new book, Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing.
Whether you’ve struggled with body image, experienced spiritual harm, or simply long to feel more whole—this conversation is for you.
We explore:
* Hillary’s personal story of healing from an eating disorder—and how it led her into her life’s work
* Why body image issues are never just about the body* How trauma fragments our nervous system and disrupts our sense of safety, trust, and self
* What spiritual trauma is and how it can quietly take root in early beliefs and experiences
* How our attachment to God is often shaped by relational wounds—and what healing can look like
Order your copy of Holy Hurt here
Resources:
- Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing by Hillary L. McBride, PhD
- Other books by Hillary L. McBride, PhD:
- https://holyhurtpodcast.com/
- The Birth of the Living God by Ana-Maria Rizzuto
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 48: Loving Your Body as a Spiritual Practice, Why the Flesh Isn’t the Body, and 3 Heresies We Kind of Believe
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Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript:
Alison Cook: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast today. I couldn't be more honored and thrilled to share a really insightful conversation with someone who has helped me a ton on my own healing journey. It's Dr. Hillary McBride.
Hillary is a psychologist, researcher, speaker and author, known for her compassionate, holistic approach to embodiment, spirituality and healing trauma. Her groundbreaking work has been pivotal in helping countless individuals, including myself, as you'll hear me share with Hillary in today's episode, understand and heal in so many ways, but especially our relationships with our bodies.
She's the author of several books, including The Wisdom of Your Body, Mothers, Daughters, and Body Image, and Practices for Embodied Living. Today we're gonna talk about some of those themes, but we're also gonna talk about her brand new book that's coming out this week. It's called Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing.
I was so honored to play a role in this project. Hillary reached out to me and asked me to lend my voice to the conversation, both for the podcast series called Holy Hurt, and this book that Hillary has written that courageously explores the intersection of spiritual and bodily trauma.
In today's episode, we dive into some fascinating insights on a couple of different topics. We're gonna touch on how body image issues often reflect deeper spiritual and societal wounds, and why simply focusing on body image isn't enough.
We're gonna talk about the profound impact of trauma on our nervous systems and why it leads to fragmentation, disconnection, and such a lingering sense of unsafety, some of Hillary's insights on spiritual trauma, and how it can be rooted in our beliefs and early experiences.
Hillary shares her personal and professional insights with extraordinary warmth and depth, helping us understand how reconnecting with our bodies and addressing spiritual wounds can lead to authentic lasting healing.
If you've ever felt disconnected from your body or even your spiritual identity, or simply long to find deeper integration and embodied wholeness, this episode is for you. I am thrilled to bring you my conversation with Dr. Hillary McBride.
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Alison Cook: I'm so thrilled to have you here. I can feel so much anticipation in my body and I will say, Hillary, before we dive into this topic of spiritual trauma, that I really am so excited to have this conversation with you and this beautiful book that I got to be a small part of, which is really meaningful to me.
Hillary: You are a very important voice in it.
Alison Cook: It really meant a lot to me that you included me. Your work on embodiment has meant a lot to me in my own journey. I would love for you to share with my listeners, who may not be familiar with you or your work, a little bit of why that topic became so important to you to write about. That was really the beginning of your public work, if I understand your body of work correctly.
Hillary: Yeah. Thank you for that invitation. I always like to anchor interviews like this in the personal, because that's the place where all of our material comes from. As much as we like to say otherwise, we do this and do it with passion and commitment because it touches some place in us.
The work of spiritual trauma and embodiment are not so separate for me. I can talk about that as I transition us maybe out of my story. But I came to the work of embodiment through my own profound experience of disembodiment. I came to understand embodiment because I didn't actually know how to be in my body.
The background of that is, I had an eating disorder for many years. I had been in the treatment circuit. For anyone who's familiar with the eating disorder treatment circuit, it is often a series of revolving doors that people walk through, wherein we are told as patients, you can't trust yourself, can't trust your body, can't trust what you want for your body.
Here are the guidelines. Here's something outside of you that's gonna tell you how to treat yourself, because you essentially can't be trusted with yourself. I remember I had this one therapist and we actually didn't talk about my eating disorder. We didn't talk about my weight. We didn't talk about my dietary concerns. We didn't talk about any of it.
She really invited me into this consciousness-raising space, where I started to see that my hate of my body and trying to make my body disappear was actually me being a good woman in my faith context and in my sociopolitical context.
When we look at North America, when we look at so many of the religious contexts that many of your listeners come from, I think about how often we are told that when you hate your body, when you subdue your body, when you control your body, when you make your body nothing,
you're seen as more valuable.
You're seen as being good. Like, you're doing it right. For me, that really started a conversation internally and externally with people around, what are the other ways of being? I ended up going to grad school and I was researching body image. I was looking at, how do we actually foster healthy body image?
If we know that there's a relationship between eating disorders and negative body image, could it be that if we have positive body image, it inoculates us against eating disorders? Jokes on me, because I found this whole body of research that said body image is actually insufficient as a way of understanding the full experience of being in yourself.
Because if we break down that term for a moment, image is only one dimension of the human experience. If I have a positive body image, that's great. I like how I look on the outside, but how I look is like what? 1% of who I am? I have an embodiment teacher who says, you have a million miles of unexplored territory inside of you.
Cool. As long as we're thinking about body image, that's great if you like yourself, or that's hard if you don't like how you look. But actually, that's not really the thing that we need to be orienting towards, if we're trying to repair our relationship with ourselves and move through the world in a way where we have integration, where we have presence, where we are connected to ourselves and others.
So I found this research and it was Dr. Niva Piran, her work, and the developmental theory of embodiment. It radically changed the direction of my research and the trajectory of my career. I started talking about embodiment and publishing about embodiment and really trying to research, what is this? How does it show up across the lifespan?
I looked at embodiment for aging women and in particular, perimenopause, for my doctoral dissertation. Embodiment in perimenopause. What does it mean to become even more connected to yourself through that transition? What I found is that there is a story that people were carrying, the people who struggled the most to be in their bodies, and the story that they were carrying was one, my body is unsafe.
That was usually connected to trauma–physical trauma, sexual trauma, experiences where the body felt like the scene of the crime. The other one was, my body is evil or sinful. What I was starting to hear in this work for people is that believing they could even get access to their body felt impossible.
Because they had years and years of people they trusted and family members and Scripture and prayer and any number of theological traditions and whatnot, saying the only way you'll be close to God is if you get away from your body.
Alison Cook: The flesh gets conflated with the body, and it's bad. It's a gnostic heresy.
Hillary: Say it. Say it.
Alison Cook: It’s a heresy that the body is bad. But it is often the message in church cultures.
Hillary: Exactly. What I found is that I couldn't really address embodiment without also addressing spiritual trauma. And I couldn't address spiritual trauma without also looking at the legacy that it has on our relationships with our bodies.
People who grow up in the church are hearing these ideas over and over again, but even just looking at the way that evangelical theology and that movement has shaped so much of the meta-culture in America, I don't know if there's anybody, regardless of their religious ideas or their spiritual practices, who hasn't been touched by this pervasive fragmentation at the level of mind and body.
We have started to see that bodies are subservient or secondary or at worst, evil and awful. That's baked into our philosophy in Westernized, white supremacist, Eurocentric, post-colonization cultures. So it's here, whether we name it as such. It's here, and that's how I think these topics are related.
Alison Cook: You're so right. I promise to the listener we're gonna get into spiritual trauma. But this morning, actually, as I think about that word, “embodiment”, and how you have brought that word, it's a positive. Embodiment is a direction in which one can move.
Just this morning, I have a very spiritualizing, anxious part of me, and when I do parts work with this part of me, God comes into that part, lays a hand, and embodies this part of me. “You have a body”. And I have to sit with that. But I hear your voice, because you've even tried to take it to, “you are a body”.
Hillary: What happens when we say that? Ah, it's a little spooky, isn't it? Yeah.
Alison Cook: You've also talked about when it's really hard to understand our embodiment on that deepest felt level, to take it to the third person. Your body is a she. I can be kind towards something outside of me. I can begin to see my body as almost a part of me. She is a good body.
Anyway, you've discussed this and you've brought this positive trajectory I move toward, versus what is not working. So I wanted to share that with you. Your language is so powerful, and I'm so grateful to you for that vocabulary.
Hillary: Yes. I love knowing how it's living inside of you and the wrestling and the tension and the possibility that it could be more than a thing, that our body could be someone, that it could be an aliveness, and it could be actually our aliveness. I know that can be a little tricky for some people to step into that.
That feels a little scary sometimes, because if I am my body, then everything that happened to my body happened to me. So that can be a tricky one for folks sometimes, but I am appreciating knowing more about how that lives in you. It feels so good.
Alison Cook: It’s scary to be a body in this world as a woman, as a sensitive person. Also it is our holy invitation in this healing process, that it is in fact, good. With that in mind, I do want to segue, Hillary, you speak so beautifully and in such a gentle way about the reality of trauma in
women's experiences. I'd love to hear how it lives in the body, and then move into spiritual trauma. That's a huge question.
Hillary: It's a huge question. There's a scholar named Michelle Panchuk whose work I've become really familiar with. I hope to meet her. I learned from her from afar at this point. But in one of her academic papers, she calls trauma multiply ambiguous. What she means by that is, we use the word trauma to mean so many things.
We use it to mean the thing that happened. We also use it to mean the way it happened and how it lives on in us. Sometimes we use it to talk about the big things that are insufferable. Sometimes we use it colloquially to talk about things that were hard. We can talk about trauma at the level of the individual nervous system as well as systemically.
If I'm thinking about all of those things at once, I come back to two or three main points. The first one would be fragmentation, this kind of split or schism within ourselves or between us and others at the point of overwhelm, which is the second word that often we use related to trauma.
When something is too much for our nervous system to process or make sense of, it feels like such a threat to our ability to be connected, to have our needs met, to survive, that our nervous system tips over into this place of not processing, of not integrating, of not holding sensation in mind.
At the same time of not storing memory, it lives on in perpetuity inside of us, and our nervous system is responding as if the thing is still happening because it doesn't have that sequencing, of feeling over. That's part of our body's way of keeping us alive. It is saying, I'm gonna be at the ready.
Because this is not done, and I need to keep protecting you through dissociation, through terror, through flashbacks, through whatever it is, through this sense of losing contact with the sense of safety in the here and now.
When we think about that word fragmentation, I think it helps us hit the multiple levels of how we can experience trauma. Because trauma, yes, on a neuro-anatomical level, there is a split that happens. We call it the corticothalamic uncoupling.
Cortex and thalamus, two parts of a brain that normally are talking and integrating sensation, presence, emotion, memory ideas, meaning making, time–they stop talking to each other. There's an inability for us to complete a response or get through to the other side of something.
But we can also look at fragmentation in terms of me and you, or me in the world, or me and God, or me and my meaning making system. When something is so big that it fractures something inside of us, another word I would use instead of fragmentation is “shattering”. It touches every part of our life and touches all the ways we relate to other people.
All it takes is a survivor of relational trauma to know, our bodies are really good at generalizing, and it's not the person who hurt us that feels scary. It can be any other person. So that's what I mean when I say there is a shattering. Previously, people might have been good and trustworthy. Because of the trauma, it's not that person who hurt me that I can't trust, but it's any other person who could hurt me.
Alison Cook: When you describe it that way, what's happening in the body, we cannot help that. We can't will ourselves to get those parts of our brains to reconnect. That's not a willpower thing. That's not a, “what's wrong with me”, which is often where we go in self-shame. We're aware–I had this bad experience at this one place. Why do I still feel it? I love how you described the literal fragmentation
Hillary: Yeah. Thank you. You're setting me up really nicely to talk about the spiritual trauma piece of this. The way that I understand spirituality is that spirituality is an inborn human desire for meaning-making, for connection, for a sense of trying to pursue connection.
It's this inborn human natural desire for us to discover, to seek purpose, to feel connected to ourselves and others, and ultimately to God. Spirituality is not what we practice. Those are spiritual practices. That's how we enact our desire to connect. Spirituality is not religion, which is a culture of how we as a group of people say, hey, we're gonna practice answering these big questions we have.
Spirituality is an inborn drive for connection. That's the most simple way of describing it. So let's go back to trauma for a second–shattering and fragmentation. If we hold those two side by side, I don't think that there's any trauma that isn't also spiritual trauma, because trauma at its very core is getting in the way of connection within me, between us, and in the big picture.
If what gets shattered is that sense of, I can move towards others for help, or I can trust my body, or I believe that God is here with me even though it's hard, I don't understand how any trauma at its very root is not also spiritual in nature.
Alison Cook: So this is exactly what I wanted to ask you. Because religious trauma might be a distinct thing as it happens within an institution, but that's what I wanted to ask about spiritual trauma. I think a little bit about attachment theory. I was really informed by Ana-Maria Rizzuto, The Birth of the Living God, and how our earliest experiences of mother love, father love, that attachment, that safety maps onto and shapes and influences our experience of God.
I know that's a simplification of what you're saying, but that is an example of wherever there is trauma or a wound or a fragmentation to the soul, it permeates all of our relational connectivity, including our relationship with God, but also our relationship with other people.
Hillary: Oh, that makes perfect sense. I think we can even simplify it further, or maybe you tell me if it's simplifying or complexifying, that our brain-body system is an association making system. Which means that our brain-body system is always looking for connections between things and it's pairing things, especially things that are threatening and dangerous.
For example, it doesn't take long if you burn your hand on the stove, before you realize you gotta be careful around the stove. When the element is red, it's hot. Or when you're in you're walking in a dark alley, if you feel someone's footsteps behind you and you don't know what's gonna happen next, it would make a lot of sense if the next time you're in a dark alley that you're gonna be on the lookout and you're gonna be listening for footsteps.
You're gonna be watching and wondering, where's the exit? How do we get out? Who's around? Our brain is constantly making associations, and good ones, helpful ones–this is part of our survival. If you think about what you're saying about early attachment experiences, where we learn, daddy's unsafe, mommy's unsafe, daddy hurts me, mommy hurts me, whatever the story is, then you go into a church where people are saying God is like your father, God is like your mother…
Your brain is saying, I'm going to take this impression that I've made over here and transfer it over here. I don't even think we have to talk about it from a symbolic lens. We can say quite literally, the injuries that we have that are encoded related to father, of course, are gonna be pulled up when someone says God is father.
It makes perfect sense from a neurobiological perspective, so I'm glad that you brought it up. That's how brains work. That's true.
Alison Cook: You say it so well, and then I think to myself, then the self-shame comes in.
What's wrong with me, that I think God is mean? What's wrong with me, that I have a fight-flight response when people are talking about God the father? As opposed to, my brain is making an association that is for my survival.
Hillary: Yeah. It's almost ubiquitous that people have that response. What's wrong with me? I would say, again, that happens in religious spaces and culture at large. There is something in trauma literature and in particular, religious trauma literature, that we call hermeneutic injustice.
The idea is that frameworks for meaning making and understanding what is happening inside of us are often deliberately kept from people, such that they can't then know how to make sense of what is happening inside of them, which is a really useful tool to get people to feel shame and blame, and like they need to do more of the things that return them to the place where the injury happens.
There is this cycle of abuse that can happen where you keep people in the dark, uninformed about their bodies, about trauma, about healthy systems, about healthy family dynamics, about power and control, about abuse. If you keep people in the dark about that and you tell them everything happens for a reason, and you tell them that their bodies are bad, and anytime their bodies afraid it's because they're sinning, then it's really easy for people to disavow the messages that bodies give them that say, this does not feel safe.
We hate the body instead of thinking critically about the context that's making us feel unsafe. So what you're saying is, at the very core of a lot of these normative spiritual trauma experiences, people blame themselves because they've been taught to blame themselves without being given the opportunity to look and ask why.
Why do I feel so much shame? Why do I feel so scared? Why? Why is that the go-to inside of me? Maybe it's not because I'm bad. Maybe it's because the context I was in was harmful to me, or that relationship or that leader or that idea injured me in some way.
Alison Cook: When you introduce the Holy Hurt podcast, you ask this series of really powerful questions that I think is a little bit of what you're saying. They're so good.
How do you point to something specific that was so regularly occurring that it was actually woven into the fabric of your development?
How can you name what was wounding when the source of the trauma causes you to sever the knowing that a wound existed in the first place?
Hence, we arrive at adulthood with all of this stuff going on inside of us without the tools to critically evaluate the context. So what do we do? How do we unravel this? How do we begin to heal? I wanna get there, but I wanna circle back to this idea of spiritual trauma.
I think many people listening, when they see those words, are thinking to some degree, it's a trauma that relates to my prayer life. It's a trauma that relates to my experience of church. It's a trauma that relates to my relationship with God. In your experience as a clinician, as a researcher, what are peoples’ lived experience of what we're calling spiritual trauma?
Hillary: Yeah, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this too, because I imagine we could collaboratively make quite a list for people. But I would say it spans everything from clergy sexual abuse all the way to being spanked, which we know in Canada is illegal. It's a form of child abuse.
And being told, this is because God loves you, this is because I love you. The things that many of us considered is how we raise kids. It’s just normal parenthood. My parents are just doing this because they love me and because someone at the church told them to.
There's a whole spectrum that includes the really obvious things that have major religious connotations, all the way to the things that are seemingly not religious in a way, because they're happening in our homes. But I think that probably the most common hallmark of spiritual trauma, and I'd be curious to know what you have to say about this, I believe it is people being told that they are bad to their core.
You are bad and that's why you need Jesus. You're actually fundamentally bad. For people to be told this in a very confusing way that sounds loving and sounds like this is the right way, and we're celebrating you. I think I could boil it down to this: spiritual trauma is believing it is so good to believe you are so bad,
Alison Cook: That's well put. There is an embodied component to that. There's a split. I am bad. I don't think it's biblical, this idea that we have to hate ourselves to know God's love. It makes no sense. I like to emphasize the original goodness. Yes, we are imperfect. Sin is so misunderstood. So I'm with you on that, Hillary, you said that so well. It makes no psychological sense.
Hillary: In any other context, my secular psychologist friends, if they came to me with a case and they said, oh my gosh I'm hearing from this patient that as a child, they were told, you're bad, here are all the things you have to do, under no circumstances would we question it. That's abuse.
The clinical guidelines are so clear. That's extremely damaging to a person's sense of self.
It's the shattering that we were talking about earlier, and yet when we put it in a spiritual context, people say, oh, but this is how we raise children. This is how you actually get close to God.
It is really messy because people feel a sense of needing to buy into that belief as a means of connecting to their community, which is a fundamental human need for survival as well.
To be close, to be connected, to belong–we will do any number of things to belong to people. I think there's no fault in that. We need community. But it's wild how normal these things can sound when it seems like everyone around us believes them too.
Alison Cook: I love also how you're painting the spectrum all the way from the more obvious clergy sexual abuse, which is horrific and I'm so glad you're naming it, to cultures of abuse where there's narcissism.
Our friend Chuck DeGroat writes so well about narcissism, and what we're talking about here, where otherwise really loving parents have inherited or ingested, maybe even in a well-meaning way, a really bad theology. It's in the air that we breathe in many ways.
Hillary: Yeah. I think that can be scary for some of us who are parents. We're listening to this thinking, oh, I don't wanna change my view of my parents. They did some of these things. What should I do? It can be really scary to open the box on what “normal” experiences did I have or did I create for someone that were inherently spiritually traumatic?
What I like to remind myself is, you cannot heal something that you pretend does not exist. So if we are thinking about moving towards integration, the way towards the wholeness that we're after is not to pretend that didn't happen. Also it's important for us to recognize, on some level, trauma in its ubiquity.
It's around us and in us. Gabor Mate writes about this exquisitely, that there's actually something about us being able to see the scale and the scope of it that can move us towards reorganizing our systems, that can move us towards seeing, whoa, no wonder things are awry. We all are fragmented from each other and we use the earth and our capitalist society is more interested in money than preserving relationships.
Oh my gosh, trauma is baked into the foundation of the way that we exist, I would argue. But for me, my journey of spiritual trauma healing has included looking at how I have perpetuated it. It takes a really clear sense of knowing I am good to be able to do that. There's this interesting thing there; when I am connected to the truth of who I am, that I am loved and good, then I don't have to put blinders up to how I've hurt other people.
It actually is part of the healing, not inside of me, but between us, for us to look at, ooh, how deep does this go?
Alison Cook: It is a paradox. Shame keeps us fragmented. I often think it is a miracle, in light of all of the toxicity, that we still catch glimmers of this being who is love and who does call us good and beloved and delighted in. It's a miracle in many ways that triumphs through all of the clutter that so many of us inherited.
I wanna also touch on this for the listener. You do such a beautiful job of validating the different journeys people find themselves on when they begin to do this work of naming, oh, this has been toxic.
Hillary: There are some people, like you said, who need to get as far away as they possibly can from anything that signals danger, of course. That's really hard to do when you've been told that your perpetrator is omnipresent. That's really hard to do when you've been told that the abuser, the person who is making this all happen, is God. God is everywhere.
So I wanna acknowledge the complexity of that. Spiritual trauma is so hard. So there are the people who need to get as far away from that as possible to, like you said, the people who are in this tension of needing to disorganize and reorganize their meaning making systems, their relationship to spirituality.
Then I would say that there are some people on the other end of the spectrum whose religious tradition and spiritual practices will be the thing that helps them navigate and heal and mend. But it's really hard to do that if you believe that God wants you to suffer, that God wants you to be disconnected from your body, et cetera.
So there are some tensions there that people need to work out, but I would say that spectrum is so important to acknowledge, because for some people who are in one place and have found one location of orienting to spirituality as the place where they've done their healing, it's so easy for us to ascribe to other people that it needs to look the same.
I actually think that part of an integration on a we-level is our ability to tolerate difference and still see value in belonging. So stay in the church, if that is what matters to you and that is helping you heal the wounds. I am so glad you are healing those wounds.
As well as the person who's in the church looking at the person who's running, saying, I am so glad you're getting away from what feels scary, the place you were told you had to stay put and sit down and be good. You get out, you run as fast and far as you can, and you have me with you, my hand at your back, every step of the way.
If we can do that for each other, we actually begin to mend on a systemic level, the spiritual injuries that fragment us from each other.
Alison Cook: I love that. I feel that in my body when you say that, I feel like some of the divisiveness of how we're supposed to heal breaks my heart, because it is such a personal journey. I have friends and family members who, to your point, have had to run, and their only way to salvage a semblance of the love and goodness and beauty is to disassociate.
I wanna, quote you Hillary, because I think this is one of the more powerful quotes. “Spiritual trauma is someone handing you an inner critic and telling you it's the voice of God.” That's what we're talking about. When we have to disentangle from that, it may look like throwing the baby out with the bath water to some degree, because it's so hard to disentangle.
So let's talk about healing, with this idea that it will look different for everybody. But on some level, we've associated shame and fragmentation and pain and self-doubt and self-hatred with the voice of God, and we begin to realize this is not in fact God. How would you invite the listener to begin the process of healing?
Hillary: Coming back to safety in the body could be the place people start. It might be the last place people go, because being in a body has been so difficult for them. But I think increasing levels of skill around tolerating discomfort, being able to stay with sensation in the body long enough that we can get to the other side of hard questions and hard conversations allows us to then be able to tolerate the discomfort of being able to say, what if that's not who God is?
That was the story about God I was told, and that story is wrong. There's a great unraveling that happens on the other side of that, and it can feel like a free fall into nothing. If that's a story, how do I trust any other story, and which story is true? What do I do and do I decide or is it someone else's decision?
Who outside of me is gonna tell me what to do? There is an incredible, visceral terror and dis-ease that people feel as they start to pull apart their meaning-making structure. I think, again, this is my embodiment lens, if we can stay with the body and learn how to be with sensation and learn how to talk to our body.
“Thank you for telling me this is a scary question and I'm realizing, body, that this is a lot for us to be with. You're telling me you need to move my body, because there's a lot of energy here”. That allows us to hang with some of those questions over time and learn to be in the uncertainty for a season.
So I would say that being with the body is elemental for recovery. I would also say that finding new connections and spaces for belonging is essential too, because most of us have these experiences baked into our social networks. If you think about being in a church and being raised in that church, it's where you go five times a week and it's your friends and it's your youth group and it's your babysitter and everybody's there.
It's really hard to move away from that meaning-making system and the beliefs and the ideas if it's also the way we get belonging, which as I said earlier is our fundamental need. So if we can find access to connection with people, whether it's through therapy or support groups or peer groups or extending our relationships to people outside of that worldview, then we can begin to think critically.
To bring us back to body image, how do we change our relationship to our bodies, when the world around us is saying, hate them? It's good to make them disappear, alter them, cut them up, chop them off, do all sorts of things.
If we have a subgroup that we identify with who thinks critically about what media is doing and body narratives, then even if we live in this big meta-system that's saying bodies are bad, we actually can protect and preserve our relationship with ourselves because we have relationships with others who reinforce different ways of thinking about ourselves. That's true for body relationships and spiritual remaking.
Alison Cook: The solution to the fragmentation is connection to body, connection to others, I might also say connection to nature. That's been a source for me of embodiment. But that's really beautiful, Hilary. You take it right out of the abstract, it’s so earthy.
Hillary: You said earthy right after you were talking about connection to nature, and I wanna highlight that for a moment because I think part of the question of how have I perpetuated spiritual trauma or how have I benefited from others’ spiritual trauma takes us back to colonization and fragmentation of the land between us and the land.
The way that we use land as a thing instead of aliveness that is supporting our aliveness–it has really been my indigenous friends and community that have taught me, trauma didn't really exist until colonization happened because no one was ever separated from themselves. No one was ever separated from the land.
No one was ever separated from their community and their family. We all lived together. We all had practices. We were all in relationship with medicines and land and ceremony, and that for me was a huge wake up call. Trauma is a relationally mediated process. There's always an element of relationship that helps us heal and some sort of connection that gets fractured at the heart of trauma.
Again, baked into the fabric of our society is a fracture with the land. It is the fact that many of us don't even think of the land as another parent who can hold us, the fact that we don't think about land as a source of medicine and communication and aliveness and vibrancy, you could say, a primary incarnation as some theologians would say.
The place where we actually see God's self revealed, the fact that we don't even think about that or the fact that we don't even think about our bodies, those are symptoms of these downstream effects of trauma that is happening at a major systemic level for us that we don't even know about. I'm very grateful you added land there.
Alison Cook: Yeah. I grew up at the base of a mountain, and that mountain is very much like an attachment figure to me. I tend to attribute that to the Creator, to God. I think about it like top-down and bottom-up approaches in psychology to healing. Top-down is, I go to God and then I appreciate nature. That can be very common.
What you're saying is, go to nature, or go to your body. Start there. And using my words, that will bring us into a relationship with the author of all things good and beautiful and loving and kind. That's beautiful.
Hillary: I have never put that language on it in terms of this material, so thank you for that. That insight so resonates with my work. We heal in a bottom-up way, so of course we would heal from spiritual trauma in a bottom-up way too.
Alison Cook: Yeah. As we close, Hillary, I shared about Holy Hurt in the introduction, but I'd love to hear your heart behind it more personally and also what you are doing in this space, to help folks who have been hurt.
Hillary: Yeah. To tell a brief story, it's not really a story, but it's more of like my positionality as a trauma therapist. Some people think about my work as being extremely heavy and painful and exhausting, and yet what I know is, at the end of the day, I am more connected to a source of hope inside of me.
Not only because I see people mend and remake themselves, but because I see people being brave enough to look at where it hurts and believe there is something of value there. When I think about this project, it is heavy material. It is not easy to walk into and not easy for people to walk into themselves.
But I ultimately think that there is a message of hope in this, because as I said earlier, we can't mend injuries that we pretend aren't there. For us to be able to move towards where it hurts is ultimately us moving towards the wholeness that's on the other side. I mean that for people who are a million miles away from church doors.
Great. Wonderful. Look at what it took for you to have to run so far. I also mean that for people who are in the church who are new to this conversation, who feel scared and overwhelmed by looking at it. What does that mean? Does it mean that I am violating my commitments to these theological positions or my community? Can I even look at this?
What I wanna say to you is, I think this is a love letter to the church. I think that this work around holy hurt is a love letter to religion, because it's a way of saying, hey, if we are not considering the injuries, then we are missing the place where we need to bring love the most.
If we are missing the injuries, we're not seeing how we are perpetuating the injuries. There's such a beautiful example we can think of in Scripture, of Jesus risen from the dead saying, hey, look at the wounds. Look at them. Do not look away from the injuries. There, to me, feels like invocation to say, if we're gonna take our faith seriously, we actually need to see there is something prophetic about the injuries.
So whether you're in the church or outta the church, that's actually not what this is about. My primary orientation in writing this was to tell stories that help survivors. But underneath that, gosh, if we are not changing things at a systems level, we're gonna have more and more people injured by these patterns that continue and we can do it differently.
So wherever you find yourself, I hope that there's something in this book for you.
Alison Cook: That's beautiful. I wanna personally thank you again, not just for your work and embodiment, but I think what you're doing here is so necessary and so needed, and you speak with such wisdom. You have such a unique blend of gentleness and wisdom and truth-telling, because that's what you're talking about, is telling the fullness of truth.
I'm so grateful that you put the work into this.
Hillary: Thank you so much. It's not easy work, and I'm so grateful to not do it alone, and I couldn't have written this book, it would've been incomplete, without your voice and the pieces that you added to it. So thank you for contributing and for folks who are listening to our podcast episode, Alison's contribution to the book is so rich.
Alison Cook: There needs to be a very large table of us trying to figure this out. It is not solo work. We need different voices, lots and lots and lots of different voices, and I think that's what I feel–I'm so grateful to have been one voice among a chorus of very different voices trying to untangle some of these knots.
Hillary: Yeah. Well-said.
Alison Cook: Thank you so much, Hillary, for being here. So grateful for you.
Hillary: I loved it. I loved it. When my head hits the pillow at the end of the night, I'll think about this conversation and what it felt like to be in the energy of this work with you.