You Can Love God and Still Be Done With Church (For Now)

If worship music makes your chest tight, if opening your Bible brings more dread than comfort, if you still believe in God but can't bring yourself to darken the door of a church — this episode is for you.

Church hurt is real, and it runs deep. It's not a crisis of faith. It's a wound — and like any wound, it makes sense that your body and soul have learned to protect themselves.

In this episode, licensed trauma therapist Tabitha Westbrook walks through what's actually happening when church, Scripture, or spiritual practices feel threatening, and offers gentle, trauma-informed tools for the long road back to God — on your terms, at your pace.

You'll hear about:

• Why pulling away from church after being hurt isn't spiritual failure — it's your nervous system doing its job
• How to untangle God from the institution that harmed you
• What healthy grief and anger actually look like in the spiritual life
• Practical re-entry points for Scripture when your Bible feels loaded (including a surprisingly powerful tool: a children's Bible)
• How to know when — and how — to consider trusting a church community again

Whether you were spiritually manipulated, quietly burned out, or had theology used as a weapon against you, Tabitha brings both clinical expertise and personal experience to this conversation. No toxic positivity, no pressure to "just forgive and move on." Just honest, compassionate tools for healing.

"He is not mad at you because you're struggling with this. He looks at you with love."

Resources mentioned:

• The Jesus Storybook Bible by Sally Lloyd-Jones - https://amzn.to/4nLUPTV
• The Promises of God Bible by Jennifer Lyell - https://amzn.to/4fAroC7
• The Message (Bible translation) - https://amzn.to/4dEeeBs
• Restored Group Interest List — https://link.therasaas.com/widget/form/plMw2lwgpYZuDX5TXSps
• Transformational Topics Community — https://thejourneyandtheprocess.com/upcoming-events-groups/trauma-healing-support-online/
• Is My Church a Safe or High-Control Space? (Church Health Quiz) — https://tabitha.wispform.com/75ac488d

 This book is for every Christian woman who has been harmed sexually, whether that happened in childhood, adulthood, or even within your coercive controlling marriage, and you're longing to feel safe in your body again. We talk about the hard stuff, shame, desire, faith, and even questions like, is this sin or is this trauma?

You don't have to untangle it alone. Body & Soul, Healed & Whole is for you. Get a copy here today - https://a.co/d/8Jo3Z4V

👍 If this episode resonated with you, please like, subscribe, and share to help others who need this information!

📖 Order Body & Soul, Healed & Whole: An Invitational Guide to Healthy Sexuality After Trauma, Abuse, and Coercive Control

Wanna support Hey Tabi? Buy me a coffee here - https://buymeacoffee.com/heytabi

📩 Connect with Tabitha & The Journey and The Process:
💻 Tabitha's Website - www.tabithawestbrook.com
📲 Tabitha's Instagram - www.instagram.com/tabithathecounselor
🎙️ Podcast Homepage - https://heytabi.buzzsprout.com

💻 The Journey & The Process Website - www.thejourneyandtheprocess.com

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel & watch podcast episodes there

🚨 Disclaimer: This podcast is not therapy and is intended for educational purposes only. If you're in crisis or need therapy, please reach out to a licensed mental health professional.

Need to know how to find a great therapist? Read this blog post here.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If you've been hurt by the church, you might still love God but dread everything that reminds you of Him. That is not a problem with your faith. That is actually because you have been wounded. And so that response makes a ton of sense. You might still pray, but it feels really hollow. Or you've stopped praying altogether. You might open up your Bible, feel a wave of just anger and shame and anxiety and grief. Instead of feeling close to God and feeling like

When Faith Feels Unsafe

SPEAKER_00 0:39

you are with him. And then you feel guilty about all of that, on top of, well, everything else. And if that's where you are, then I want you to know you're not alone. On this week's episode of Hey Tabby, we are actually going to talk about how to heal and how to reconnect with God. Welcome to Hey Tabby, the podcast where we talk about the hard things out loud with our actual lips. We'll cover all kinds of topics across the mental health spectrum, including how it intersects with the Christian faith. Nothing is off-limits here, and we are not take two verses and call me in the morning. I'm Tabitha Westbrook, and I'm a licensed trauma therapist, but I'm not your trauma therapist. I'm an expert in domestic abuse and coercive control and how complex trauma impacts our health and well-being. Our focus here is knowledge and healing. Trauma doesn't have to eat your lunch forever. There is hope. Now, let's get going. Welcome to this week's episode of Hey Tabby.

A Trauma Informed Starting Point

SPEAKER_00 1:43

I am a licensed trauma therapist who works with men and women who have had the worst of the worst experiences. I'm going to start with what today's episode is definitely not. I am not about to defend abusive or harmful systems or tell you that you're sinning if you can't darken the door of a church. This is just me offering some gentle tools for the healing road. As Andy Colbert often says, take what you need and leave what you don't. Before we talk about tools or healing or God, I want to say something really clearly. What happened to you was real. It wasn't a misunderstanding, which so many of our survivors are often told. It likely wasn't that you're being too sensitive. Something broke that wasn't supposed to break. It's not supposed to be this way. Church hurt comes in a full spectrum of things. It can be abusive and coercively controlling behavior from the leaders. It can be spiritual manipulation, being told implicitly or explicitly that your compliance is required for belonging, can be not being allowed to question anything, and on and on. There are so many ways, unfortunately, that churches and church systems can hurt us. Some of you have had theology used as a weapon against you, purity culture that left you ashamed of your own body or sex or gave you the completely wrong idea of those. The prosperity gospel that makes you think suffering was your fault. Hellfire and brimstone

What Church Hurt Can Look Like

SPEAKER_00 3:16

language that terrorized you into believing and makes you so scared to make a misstep. And some of you just got burned out quietly. You were encouraged to give and give and give until nothing was left. And no one cared for you. You didn't even get noticed when you stopped showing up. The people that hurt you aren't just colleagues and neighbors. They are supposed to be representative of God. And that makes it a soul-level wound. It doesn't just hurt you, it contaminates the beauty that God actually intends the church to be. When we experience repeated harm in a place or from a certain kind of person, like a certain type of pastor, our nervous system learns to treat that environment itself as dangerous. So if church feels threatening, if scripture feels loaded, if worship music makes your chest tight, that makes perfect sense. Your body is seeing the threat based on past experience and is actually trying to protect you. So if even if you're out and you're like, oh my gosh, I still feel this, it makes sense. Pulling away from the things that were weaponized against you, frankly, does make perfect sense. And for most people, it's heartbreaking. We love God, we want to be in relationship with Him. We

Why Your Body Reacts To Church

SPEAKER_00 4:27

may truly value the church, but now it feels like it's radioactive. So how do we disentangle all of this and actually heal our relationship with God? And how do we even consider going back to something like church? Well, we start by reckoning with the loss. When we leave a church due to harm, we lose community, we lose a language that once made sense, we lose close friendships, we might even lose our family. And we can sometimes lose a sense of identity. You're grieving not only what happened, but an entire version of your life. And that can be brutal. Anger and lament here make so much sense. If you haven't allowed yourself to be angry and to grieve, I really want to invite you to do that. Anger and bitterness are not the same thing. You might have been told you're not allowed to be angry, but that's not true. I like to remind clients

Grief, Anger, And Lament

SPEAKER_00 5:21

there is a whole verse that says, be angry and do not sin. We should quite frankly be angry about injustice. And you can tell God that you're mad. I often encourage clients to journal these feelings, to spread them out in front of God, like Hezekiah did with the letter that he got from Sennacherib in the Old Testament, and just go, dude, what's up? And if you're not quite ready to talk to God, I get it. No worries there. You can actually write it out to him and then actually tell him when you're ready. It's not like he doesn't know anyway. He actually does know. And he's grieved by it. If God himself has become a challenge, then I absolutely invite you to get curious about what you believe about him. How do you think he looks at you? What were you told about him and his character? And are those things actually true? Was he truly represented as he represents himself? What does he say? I'll tell you, destructive systems often create an image of God. We can call it an idol if you like, that doesn't actually look like God. It reminds me of what the Israelites did after they left Egypt and they made the golden calf while Moses was up on the mountain. Aaron says to them, Here's the God that brought you out of Egypt. Like, let's think about this for a minute. The God created was a baby cow. A baby

Untangling False Images Of God

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cow. We can look at that and go, yeah, that would not be the same God that parted the Red Sea. But a leader, a persuasive leader, Aaron, who was a priest, said, See, follow this. He's God. The baby cow statue looked nothing like the real living God. And the people got in a ton of trouble for actually bowing to this thing. The prohibition against idolatry in the Bible wasn't because Jesus doesn't want us to see him, right? It's because people do a really terrible job of trying to make a picture of him. And he actually tells us who he is. He tells you about himself and he does that in the Bible. And if your church told you who he is doesn't look like who he says he is, then your church is actually way off. We also need to name the specific hurt and wound that we experienced. Again, this is another great thing to journal if you're comfortable doing so. You can also take this into a therapy or coaching session with a therapist or coach that you trust. We actually have a group that we run called Restore. And in this group, we give space for this exact thing, for naming and wrestling with the hurt, for walking toward God again. And anything that we do, of course, here is not take two verses and call me in the morning. And if this group sounds like something you might need, there'll be a link in the description to get on the list for our next group that will start this fall. Once you've named the hurt, where are your areas

Naming Wounds, Triggers, And Support

SPEAKER_00 8:03

of triggers or activation? Is it a certain set of worship songs? Is it a style of worship? Is it a particular Bible translation, a style of church service? Notice all of it and sit with it. Really let yourself just be curious. It could be one of these things, it could be all of these things, it could be any number of other things that I didn't even mention. It can even be smells. I've actually had clients who attended churches in old buildings, and certain smells, like that 70s carpet smell, could bring up all kinds of memories for people. Once you know your possible activation points, then you can learn to manage them. And that might mean going to a new denomination, using a different Bible translation, learning to breathe through activation, or even starting with an online service to see how you feel. If you need a deeper dive on some of these topics and others that'll help you grow, I do want to invite you to our transformational topics community. It's a private podcast community where we take a deep dive in a private podcast each month into a topic that helps you grow. We cover things like resilience and resilience in a hard world, how to manage and think about your identity and rebuild your identity after trauma, how to create boundaries, and so much more. Each week, you also get a tool via email that helps you practically grow in these topics. And then quarterly, we do Zoom calls with our amazing panel of experts, our licensed trauma therapists and certified coaches at the journey in the process. And here we answer your question and offer practical tips and tricks to help you get unstuck. Membership is just $10 a month, and we will have the link below so that you can join us in that community. And we really hope you do. It's a really healing space. Now let's talk about a way back to scripture. We've talked about this one on the podcast before. Sometimes, like Bible translations just get super weaponized and become part of your trigger or activation. Using a different translation can help you enter back in. Now you might want to do it slowly, but one of our favorites for many of our clients is the message. The narrative form of the message proves really helpful for a lot of people who have been deeply hurt. Another option is a children's Bible. Our favorites are the Jesus Storybook Bible and the Promises of God Bible. And it might seem a little bit silly, but we have found it to be

A Gentle Way Back To Scripture

SPEAKER_00 10:25

profoundly healing for our clients and a safe way for them to enter back in to reading the Bible without wanting to throw it across the room. And yes, it's okay that you have the urge to throw a Bible across the room when you've been hurt. We don't want you to do it, but it's definitely a thing. We don't want you to stay in isolation either when you've been pushed out. Rebuilding healthy community is essential to returning to healing in the long run. And that might start with a therapist. It might start with a trusted friend. For me, it started with a trusted pastor friend. This friend didn't push me, he didn't berate me. He was just with me. He listened to my experience. He held space and grace for what happened to me. He helped me untwist scriptures that needed to be untwisted. And it was life-giving. And for me, it was a catalyst to healing. And I've seen that in so many of my clients as well. Prayer can also get really messed up in this. And so when we experience church hurt, we might not be able to pray.

Rebuilding Prayer And Safe Community

SPEAKER_00 11:20

And if you're not ready to pray, then maybe you can write letters or journal about it. It doesn't have to be long or drawn out. It can be something as simple as this hurts. I don't know how to feel about it. And I'm pretty mad at God. There you go. And you can also just talk about it out loud with no one around. God is perfectly capable of handling however you try to engage with it and sift through the wreckage. He is not judging you for it either. He's with you in it. You also don't have to walk right back into a church of some sort. You might want to, and you can totally do that. But for many, they don't want to walk right back in. You might be getting pressure though from family or friends to just get back to it already. You might even be pressuring yourself because you feel like you have to do it. But you might really need some time and space before you're ready, and that's perfectly okay. When you are ready, whenever that happens, you want to look for a healthy community. I call it a safe enough church. Some great questions to ask are these: first of all, how does the church handle conflict and accountability? Like, can you say anything? Can you say it in like something? What happens when leadership is wrong? Do they ever admit it? Is doubt welcomed or are you corrected? What does the church believe about the roles of men and women? Are people allowed to have questions at all? Those are all really good spaces to start for this. And places that are really important that you come up with a list of questions before you walk back into

How To Vet A Safe Enough Church

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any church. I encourage people to write them down, to really look at what questions do they need to ask and those kinds of things, you know, really look at like, what do I need to know in order to even be able to take this step? And there's nothing wrong with asking pastors and elders questions. In fact, if you don't, then you're just hoping for the best. And I don't think that's wisdom. Some people find their way back to an actual congregation, like in a building. Some find a new smaller form of community, maybe a house church. Some spend a season of solitude before they're ready for any of those things. And God, in my experience, meets people in all of these spaces and in any that are in between. I know it might really be hard to fathom right now, but healing from church harm is honestly very possible. And God has not left you to just twist in the wind. He is in all of the ways that you can walk forward and walk toward his open and loving arms. He is not mad at you because you're struggling with this. He is not disappointed in you either. He's not looking at you with disdain. A little bit earlier, I asked, what do you think God looks like when he looks at you? You know, really picture what his face might look like. And if you want to look at the prodigal son, that's such a great example.

Hope For Healing And Healthy Churches

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The prodigal had done some things, right? And the Lord, you know, the father in the story who represents the Lord looked at him with care and kindness and love and threw him a party. Even the older brother, who was a legalist and like, hey, you've never done any of this for me, the father invites him back into fellowship too. None of them are left behind. And so if you've been taught that God looks at you with disdain or anger or disappointment, it's not true. He looks at you with love. And the scripture supports that. There are good churches out there, and I know it might seem like every other news article is some other heinous church scandal. And there are far too many, absolutely. But there are faithful, kind, and loving men and women out there who are gathering in congregations. They are hearing the gospel and they actually live it out. And I know that might be real hard to believe right now, but I do promise you that it's true. And if you're listening and wondering, is my church healthy? Like have some questions. Maybe there are things that don't feel so good. I'm going to leave a link to a quiz down in the description that you can take if you're curious. It can help you determine whether or not your church is a healthy space. And it can give you some options on what to do if you think, ooh, maybe not. But I want to end here by saying that what happened to you grieves the heart of God. He absolutely wants you to heal, and he is with you in it, even if you aren't sure how you feel about him right now. I hope that this episode was helpful and I'm really glad that you were here with me. And I'll see you next time on our next episode of Hey Tabby. Thanks for joining me for today's episode of Hey Tabby. If you're looking for a resource that I mentioned in the show and you want to check out the show notes, head on over to tabithawestbrook.com forward slash hey tabby. That's H E Y T A B I, and you can grab it there. I look forward to seeing you next time.