Rupture without repair
Some personal reflections on what it’s like to feel let down by institutions and organisations I trusted, and what I’m learning about how we might play our part working towards healthier systems
Over the last few years, I’ve been working to integrate some messy experiences I’ve had as part of church-adjacent organisations, that left me with B I G Q U E S T I O NS. The sorts of questions that snake their tendrils into all sorts of areas of life – emotional, spiritual, professional, community and practical. Those questions have largely arisen because of a profound internal sense of disconnect between what I thought organisations I have been heavily involved in stood for, and what I have experienced of them.
More specifically, I’ve been trying to resolve the cognitive dissonance that came up for me when organisations that first gave me a framework for thinking about justice, then seemed not to care about justice. Or when organisations that I thought were ultimately all about the flourishing of people, seemed to view the holistic flourishing of people as a sacrifice that could sometimes be made for some greater ends. Or when organisations whose faith tradition emphasises a leader who famously subverted power seem unable to critically reflect on the power they hold over people.
I’ve thought about writing about my walk through those questions for a while, but there have always been lots of good reasons not to – including but not limited to - the fact that I am in no way a professional voice in any aspect of this… the fact I don’t have lived experience of the severity many people unfortunately do (for example, I haven’t ever [thankfully] had to myself raise a concern of a serious, criminal nature)… the fact that I didn’t want to spew unprocessed pain in unhelpful ways… the fact that for a long time I’ve wrestled with wondering ‘am I just the problem here? Is it me?’…
But this week, after a time of feeling like I’ve started to integrate some of those experiences to be able to weave their tangled threads into the future tapestry of life without just unhelpfully gumming it up with lots of messy knots, I’ve been thinking about stories, and their strengths, but also their limitations. This summer I heard Darren McGarvey cautioning about how we understand and use ‘lived experience.’ He pointed out that just shouting about our narratives of situations in a vacuum is often not the way towards healing. He discussed how we often gain more from reflecting on and discerning our way through our experiences in community – and how together, we can find common threads which can be woven together into action for positive social change. One of my Big Questions has been how to move forward when people (or institutions) that you find yourself in conflict with simply shut down the conversation (probably out of self-protection) so that it’s not possible to reflect on experiences with the challenging voices who might help you see things differently; it’s been invaluable to me to have people who have processed with me and helped me to look for blind spots, but I remain very open to the idea that there are things I may be missing in my understanding of this situation. But amongst all of that, what I’ve realised is - I do have a story. The story of what I have experienced, and how I have processed it. And I’m sharing that now in case there are common themes that resonate with others, because sometimes, I think the sort of relational connection that occurs in those sorts of ‘me too!’ moments is how we make social change.
There is a brilliant lady I know who taught me that our anger matters and that, rather than feeling ashamed of it, I should pay mine good attention. Another brilliant lady this week told me that what anger often really is, is fierce love. As I write this now, I’m in a much more settled place with it all – but somewhere in the core of me, there’s still some anger that I think comes from a sort of fierce love, relating to wanting better for people than how they are often treated by church-based organisations. Some other wonderful people have taught me how to listen to my intuition, how to probe it and test it, and ultimately how to trust it. I remain thankful to them for helping me learn how to stay anchored when others made me doubt myself.
A significant part of my story, I think, is that I lived and worked for 10 years in a community where the effects of structural injustice are inescapable. This forced me deep into reflections about power, and how power is held and wielded and shared in helpful and harmful ways. Combined with my understanding of Christianity as a religion where both justice and mercy are foundational, and perhaps just some inbuilt character quirks, I have found it extremely hard – in fact, almost impossible – to stay quiet in situations where I feel people are being treated unjustly. This has happened in a number of ways, which include colleagues being treated badly, community development practices that I have learned through my own mistakes are colonial and harmful, and the use of coercive and secretive practices in the workplace. I recognise that in many of these situations, there is complexity, and perspectives that I haven’t always been able to see. But sadly, I (or people extremely close to me) have experienced a number of unhelpful responses to concerns being raised, that seemed to demonstrate that there wasn’t a real interest in hearing them and taking restorative action – or at least, that the interests of the organisation would take precedence over them. Those responses have taken different forms, but have involved, as examples:
- People in leadership acknowledging that someone’s behaviour is problematic, but expressing concern about holding them accountable because ‘they’re essential to the organisation’
- Being told ‘you’re the only person who’d be concerned about this’, when our experience was that this was clearly not true, but legally-enforced cover-ups meant that widespread concern could not be expressed. (As an aside, when I suggested to the CEO of the organisation in question that responding to serious concerns like that felt a bit like gaslighting, he rolled his eyes and told me he doesn’t understand what gaslighting is and why everyone keeps going on about it.)
- Suggesting that the real problem lies with the person raising the concerns, and that they should seek professional help to deal with their issues (when the concern-raising was actual borne out of better boundary-setting developed through professional help!)
- People refusing to engage in conversations that are difficult – for example, saying they’d come and discuss things then not showing up, or saying they’d take particular action then not doing it
- DARVO - a phenomenon that’s relatively new to me, but which I now recognise as a psychological defense mechanism that any of us can slip into using, where someone responds to being called out by reversing the ‘offender’ and the ‘victim’ and pointing blame back at the person who has raised a concern
In many ways, these are lower-level harmful behaviours. I absolutely hold my hands up and say there have likely been times where I have slipped into doing similar things. I have also been part of structures that had inadequate avenues for people to raise complaints about me (if those had arisen). But I think the particular trouble that I have experienced repeatedly – the sense of organisational, or institutional betrayal, where people or structures you thought would offer protection and accountability - stems from two key issues:
1) These sorts of interactions can be painful on a person-person level. But when there are unequal power dynamics (for example, within institutions with hierarchies, or in churches where some people have ‘spiritual authority’ over others, of where one group of people have substantially greater resources than another), the damage can increase substantially. It has been my experience that lots of church-based organisations are woefully ill-equipped to reflect on how they handle power.
2) That there is a particular kind of trauma involved in having your painful experiences dismissed by people you hoped could offer you help or resolution. Peter Levine talks about how ‘trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness’. I’m no expert in trauma, but I see there to be truth in this phenomenon; that when people walk beside us through hard times, we are often able to survive with our psychological health intact, but when we seek help and being ‘seen’ and instead are dismissed, it creates wounds that then fester without careful attention.
It has been very helpful for me, as a parent (but also just as a human) to reflect on the importance of the ‘rupture and repair cycle’, whereby breaks in a relationship due to conflict create relational distance, but the re-connection of people, through apologies and accountability, generate trust and closeness. I am aware that part of my own personal story is that I feel rupture strongly; I have had to re-wire my brain to remember that it is a normal phenomenon, and that repair is possible.
To me, repair happens when two parties come together to listen each other in a way that really hears the issues, and appropriate parties either take responsibility for their own mistakes, or offer clarification where misunderstandings have arisen.
I am struck that in every case where I have raised concerns about someone’s behaviour, I would have felt entirely differently had I either been given a full explanation of where I had misunderstood things, or if the other person had just said, ‘yes, I hear you, we’ve got this wrong, we are sorry, this is what we’ll do differently from now on’. That would have translated the sense of hurt and harm into restoration and reconciliation – with trust built, not destroyed. Instead, in so many cases, there has been no repair. Just this week, I found myself in a situation of having to say ‘no’ to an organisation whose own mistake meant that I’d have to pick up pieces in ways I felt uncomfortable with – and when I told them that, they said ‘yes, we totally understand, we take full responsibility for this and are sorry’. It was incredibly helpful for me to hear that, and now we are back in a place of being able to work together positively, with greater trust.
As someone for whom that repair feels really important – it’s taken me a while to work out why others might not want that, too. Because ultimately, if someone came to me and told me I had hurt them, I think I’d always want to say sorry. I might also want to explain myself, and I think that’s okay, if I also own the bits that are mine to own. But I think that understanding behaviour in a way that is rooted in compassion for ourselves and others can often fertilise forgiveness and healing. What’s felt so hard to me is for inadequate action to have been taken, that left the rupture festering, rather than healing.
I guess there are three main reasons I can think of to date why that might happen, but I want to learn and understand more.
1) The most obvious or surface-level one within christian organisations is, I think, this desire to avoid ‘damaging the mission of the organisation’. It seems that often, what starts as a noble cause becomes something that people then need to sustain at all costs. The end (whatever that is) justifies the means. In a number of places, I’ve encountered attitudes that seem to me to be saying that as long as ‘souls are being saved’ (my paraphrase), it doesn’t matter if people are treated carelessly or without dignity along the way. And in places where this HAS happened, rather than repenting and seeking restoration, organisations seem often to slip into fear, and into the need to maintain their reputation by hushing it up. This leads to practices like the use of NDAs, which to me (and, it seems, a growing number of Christians) are harmful in their secrecy.
2) I am not a theologian, but I’ve also reflected lots on how certain theological thinking seems to fuel an approach that doesn’t lend itself well to healthy repair. If, for example, you are deep in the sort of theology that believes deeply that humans are sinful to the core, and that all that is needed is in-your-head feelings of sorriness to count as repentance – it seems all too easy for the practical action of repentance to get forgotten. Or if your belief system hinges around Christians (and churches) being enlightened and forgiven and ‘the good guys’ (rather than a collection of messy humans), and if you’re positioning yourselves as on a mission to ‘seek and save the lost’, then being called out can be tricky to integrate into your narrative. That’s quite a broad brush way of putting it, but I guess what I’m driving at is the idea that theology that isn’t accompanied by practical theology of repentance and restoration can, I believe, cause more harm than good, and I have wrestled greatly with this within my own beliefs and understandings.
3) Thirdly – I wonder how much of this is to do with our inability to deal with feelings of shame. I write this as someone who has had to pay close attention to their own relationship with shame, and their ability (or inability) to deal with making mistakes. I find it extremely hard to extend myself the compassion I’d want to extend to others, and know that I’m prone to spirals of shame when I’m called out. It is a work in progress to build healthier ways of being okay with making mistakes. But I think I have reflected that in lots of churches, and church-adjacent organisations, shame is often suppressed, or swept under the carpet, or pushed away onto someone else. I think that sometimes, the shutting down of conversations happens because people are profoundly uncomfortable with their own (normal, human) feelings of shame. Or because the structures we have are based on what is pragmatic for achieving goals and tasks, rather than on what enables humans to flourish. And I would love us to reckon with this to build a world where we learn to move through shame (both individual and organisational) in healthier ways.
I don’t know. This is just my speculation as I try to make sense of what I’ve experienced. And I write it with the recognition of the fact we’re fortunate to only have experienced this sort of low-level behaviour (though it’s still had a significant impact on us); there are many who have gone through much, much worse. There are so many brilliant people writing about issues like spiritual abuse in churches (Lisa Oakley, Diane Langberg and Chuck de Groat being amongst the ones whose work I have greatly appreciated) and I don’t for a second pretend to be an expert. But I do think that if we practiced being better at repair in the smaller stuff, we might be better at it for the big, really horrible stuff. My story is that I experienced unexpected behaviour that left me with questions, and it’s been profoundly helpful for me to walk through that with people who have experienced, or seen, the same kinds of things.
Part of the reason why I’m writing this now is that I feel in a more hopeful place – despite the prevalence of bad practice we see in church-based organisations, and despite what I’ve experienced (or been part of) personally. One of my biggest pieces of learning recently has been that anger often feels like it nestles right next to hope. I think that real, gritty hope (as opposed to toxic positivity) is born where we can look at the grim reality and find ways to imagine how things might be better.
I hope for grace, and healing, and restoration. I believe in accountability, and proper ‘repentance’ – that isn’t simply about managing shame, but about repair. I am not sharing this story because I want to generate more shame. I’m sharing it because I want us to collectively build better ways of relating to each other (especially within organisations and institutions). I believe we can do that work. I believe we desperately need structures that allow us to do that work. I’m really grateful for all the people who are doing that work with far greater wisdom and expertise than me that I can learn from, and I’m grateful for the people who are learning alongside me. And I’m always in for that conversation.