Conviction or Condemnation The Truth About Shame in Christianity

Are you exhausted by shame-based Christianity, constant conviction, and feeling like you can never “measure up” to God? In this episode, we talk about religious trauma, spiritual bypassing, inner healing, nervous system healing, and why so many Christians stay stuck in cycles of fear, shame, condemnation, and self-hatred instead of experiencing true freedom in Christ.

In today’s episode of Red Hot Truth Ministry, we dive deep into the difference between conviction and condemnation, trauma and sin, and why healing the root matters if we truly want transformation. Michelle shares her personal testimony of healing from complex PTSD, chronic illness, narcissistic abuse, religious shame, and nervous system dysregulation through Jesus, inner healing, deliverance, and renewing the mind.

This episode explores:
✨ Shame-based Christianity
✨ Religious trauma and church hurt
✨ Spiritual bypassing in Christian spaces
✨ Inner child healing and soul wounds
✨ Deliverance and emotional healing
✨ Trauma responses and coping mechanisms
✨ OCD, anxiety, hypervigilance, and nervous system healing
✨ Conviction vs condemnation
✨ Healing after narcissistic abuse
✨ Why Christians stay stuck in repetitive cycles of sin and shame
✨ The connection between trauma, fear, and spiritual warfare
✨ How Jesus leads us into freedom, healing, and transformation

If you’ve ever felt exhausted trying to “fix yourself,” constantly battling shame, fear, or self-hatred while desperately trying to follow Jesus, this message is for you. You are not beyond healing, and God is not condemning you for your pain. True transformation happens when we allow the Lord to heal the root instead of living trapped in cycles of fear and spiritual striving.

📖 Scriptures Mentioned:

* Romans 8:1
* Matthew 11:28-30
* John 10:10

Website - redhottruthministry.com 

🙏 Subscribe for more teachings on:
Christian healing, deliverance, trauma recovery, narcissistic abuse recovery, nervous system healing, inner healing, emotional healing, spiritual warfare, overcoming fear and shame, walking with Jesus, and renewing your mind through Christ.

Disclaimer: This content is shared from a Christian faith-based perspective for educational and spiritual encouragement purposes only. Please use your own discernment and seek professional medical, mental health, or crisis support where needed. This channel is not a substitute for licensed medical or therapeutic care.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, beautiful souls. Welcome back to Red Hat Troop Ministry, a home for the broken where healing begins. If you're new here, I'm Michelle and I help people heal their soul wounds through the love, power, and transformation of our Lord Jesus Christ. I've been through an awful lot in my life and was battling very severe complex PTSD as well as a lot of different complex illnesses. I knew that I couldn't continue on the way I had been because my life wasn't even worth living. I was living in constant fight or flight. I was exhausted every single day. I had a very severe disability. I was in a lot of pain. And I was trying to raise my family, and it was just really difficult. After a near-dead experience, the Lord revealed to me the root cause of my illness, which was a whole lot of trauma that I had blocked out and avoided dealing with for many years. And then he led me through this process of healing, where we started to really heal my inner child, heal my soul wounds, and pull me out of captivity. And we walked through deliverance, and it literally changed my life. The pain in my body went from being an eight minimum on the scale daily to being a three or four. So my life has drastically changed in the last four years. And that was after deciding to go no contact from my family and start reclaiming back my autonomy and my power and my voice from all the things that had happened in my life. I had a lot of issues with much of the Christian lingo that we hear. There's a lot of very popular Christian influencers, and the way they speak is triggering to me. From the moment I became a born-again Christian, when I started to watch Christian content, I find these words quite unsettling in my spirit. You know, words like conviction, words like purity, the Christian lingo that you hear parroted over and over and over again. And it's not because I don't believe in sanctification or deliverance or healing or removing sin or repentance. I absolutely believe in all of those things and I teach all of those things. But I also look at the why underneath and not necessarily just copycatting what I'm hearing all around me, because that is how indoctrination happens. And I don't trust it. I don't trust influencers that all sound the exact same, and they're preaching things and setting all these really difficult expectations of Christians without giving them tools to get there. How do you bridge that gap? How do we bridge the gap between sin and purity? So that word purity as well can be very triggering because it implies that there's something inherently unclean about you or something wrong with how you have been. A lot of purity within Christian culture is boiled down to sex and fornication. And honestly, purity is the state of your heart, it is what's in here. And a lot of us need to work on our heart posture so that we can walk in God's image and so that we can be more like Him. And our outward behaviors, how we show up in the world, is a reflection of what's in our heart. So we have to go to the roots always. You have to go to the root. And recently I saw a very popular Christian influencer again. And this is somebody that I actually like. You know, I like her. She seems to have the fruit of the spirit, she seems gentle, she seems kind, she seems to truly have a real connection and relationship with the Lord. So I am not being mean or coming down hard on all these people. It's just all I feel when I listen to her is shame. So much shame. And I think her interpretation of the word, Christianity, and other things that she teaches are coming from that place of unresolved shame. And we have to be really careful that we're not absorbing that because some of that is trauma, some of it is her own conditioning, her own wounding, and she needs healing for that. But as Christians, if we're turning up and absorbing these teachings from somebody that's very rooted in shame or fear, then we're not moving through that process of transformation. We're just staying stuck in the wound, in the pain. And when you approach your fate through that lens of shame, and you're using Jesus as an emotional blanket to constantly soothe the same wounds and the same pain, but you're not actually breaking out of the pain and climbing out of the pit and moving closer and closer to freedom, because that's ultimately what he does with us. When we come home to the Lord, when we're born again, there is a process of transformation that begins. And when we look at everything through the lens of fear and shame and control, we're staying stuck in our patterns and in their pain for much longer. Because condemnation does not bring freedom. What brings freedom is love and learning to love yourself, even with your sin and your messiness and your darkness and your wounding and the things you've been through. That's how you climb out of the pit. That's how you start to move forward. And the Lord guides us gently through this process because he is loving, he is gentle, he is patient, he is kind, he is not condemning us. The Bible says there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. So this word conviction, I find very triggering because the Lord doesn't just convict me, and then I feel a bunch of shame, and I stay stuck in the shame, and then turn up and speak to my audience about how shameful and bad I am and how I should just repent and that's it. There's no fruit in that. I'm still dealing with all the same messy emotions and the pain, and it's all still there because we haven't actually addressed the wound. We've just bypassed it and tried to jump over it. We are just going to get sucked back into it again tomorrow. So, in order to actually experience fruit and freedom, you have to get into the wound and you have to feel it and you have to heal it and you have to allow yourself to understand why, why you're like this to begin with. The teaching that I came across was somebody saying that if you have any sort of jealousy or envy in you, then this is evil, and we have to just repent of all evil and put it down. And I have an issue with that teaching because it's not necessarily true that you are evil if you experience jealousy or if you experience envy. When when you see two toddlers playing with their toys, they are going to get jealous and threatened of each other. They're gonna fight, they're gonna cry, if they both want mom's attention, they're gonna get triggered by each other, if they're compared to each other, if they are conditioned to believe that one is inferior than the other, if they have insecure attachment, if they have a wounding or shame, then they're going to struggle with this even more as they grow. And this is attachment, Terry, and it is trauma, and it is actually very normal human behavior. But the problem with envy is envy is a deadly sin and it can cause people to act out in very negative ways. It can cause people to triangulate and manipulate and slander and gossip and trip other people up and try to cause them to fall on their face. I've dealt with a lot of envious people in my life, and it's really not nice their behavior and how they treat others. But that doesn't mean that if you have little twinges of jealousy every now and again, that you are evil. It means that there's probably a wound in there. There's probably a time in your life where you felt inadequate, where you compared yourself to others, where you felt insecure. Maybe your parent compared you to a sibling or a cousin, or you were the last one picked on the football team. So we have to sit with the wound. We have to go back and say, Lord, search my heart and show me where this wound began. And he's going to bring you back to that time. He's going to say, When you were 10 years old, you started to feel deeply inadequate and insecure because this person told you that you're ugly. And you sit with the child, you heal their wounds, you heal their pain, and you tell them that they are enough. And then they are going to reintegrate and come home. During that process, you can also repent for those feelings. Um, I talk about repentance all the time. But my point is you can't there has to be something to bridge the gap. You can't just bypass it. You can't just say, This thing in me is evil, so I repent and I throw it away. Because how are you going to put it down when you don't even know where it's coming from to begin with? You have to understand the root of it. Why do you feel that way? We have to sit with our pain, we have to acknowledge it, and we can't bypass it by calling parts of ourselves evil. Because not everything is evil within you. Some of it is just trauma and pain. And we have to be allowed to process these things. Because when you see everything through the lens of warfare and the enemy and demons, sometimes that can keep you stuck for longer in fear and hypervigilance and stress and trauma. Instead of recognizing that not everything is a demon, some things just need healing. Sometimes people just need love. Sometimes these parrots of you just feel broken and they need somebody to pick them up off the floor and tell them, you are enough. You were always enough and you are enough to Jesus and you were chosen by him. And he still loves you even when you're struggling with this thing. He still loves you. He's still here for you. He's not abandoning you. He's not angry at you. He doesn't think you're evil. But if there is a demonic spirit maybe that feeds off of your patterns and your wounds and whispers lies and tries to pull you into deception, then by healing the root, healing the wound, healing the pattern, you are then cutting off their access point. So they can no longer access you because you have cut off that root. This is something that has bothered me from the beginning since my walk with the Lord, because I've been healing my inner child since before I became born again. And I just see so much spiritual bypassing. When people focus too much on conviction and trying to peel away their flesh, it's like they're trying to peel off this slime. Like, you know the way slime sticks to everything, and it's really hard to remove. And and they're like, Father, forgive me because I'm this doing this evil thing, and they're trying to peel it all away in this unnatural way, and it just sticks and it won't leave. And then they become more fear-driven and more shame and more what's wrong with me. I'm just this awful sinner, and I can't ever break free from this awful thing. Can you not see that cycle and how much it traps you and how much it keeps you stuck? And that's what the enemy wants. The enemy wants you in these cycles because it's it's a good way to distract you from your purpose, first of all, when you are just constantly ruminating and repeating this same pattern over and over and over again. Bible talks about these wolves in sheep's clothing and says, be careful of these ravenous wolves because they tie up heavy burdens onto people and they will not do like what they're saying you should be doing, they're not doing themselves. And I'm not saying that this person is a false prophet, but I'm saying this teaching as a whole is coming from the enemy's camp. It is there to cause more shame, more confusion, more fear, more exhaustion. Can you see how exhausting it is to constantly perpetuate the same cycle and never get results? And that's what the enemy wants, because you're trying to unnaturally remove parts of yourself that cannot leave, you cannot become unstuck from these things without addressing the root cause of it. And it can start to feel like I'm always the problem, my emotions are dangerous, my humanity is bad, my struggles mean that I'm failing God. Sometimes there's just too much focus on crucifying the flesh, dying to self, fighting sin, uprooting evil, monitoring every thought, being afraid of every emotion. And people end up in this war against themselves, and that is a recipe for a disease. Take it from somebody who got very sick because I was at war with myself most of my life. You know, when you're a child growing up in a dangerous environment, you are constantly battling because part of you knows that this is wrong, this is not normal, but parts of you are trying to pretend that you're safe and delude yourself into believing that you're safe, and you're constantly going back and forth. And you're you're getting triggered, anxious, overthinking, overwhelmed, then ruminating on that for days and days, and you get so tired and burnt out, and then your abuser is nice to you again. So then you tell yourself, okay, I'm safe, I'm safe. They're not that bad. And then it happens again. And it's the same cycle that's repeating here. The enemy is poking at a wound, and he wants you to feel that you are impure, unclean, dangerous, dirty, bad in some way, flawed, broken, broken beyond repair, that he needs to come along and peel away all your slime, but it won't leave. The reason it won't leave is because you're refusing to actually go within and address the pain underneath it. And when you go in and you address it and you see yourself as this human being with emotions, with pain, with trauma, with these wounds that occurred, maybe due to dysfunction, maybe there was grief, maybe something happened in your early life, and you address these wounds and you say to this part of you, I am enough. You are enough. You were always enough. You were not broken, you were not flawed, and you are learning to love yourself in real time and renew your mind, upgrade your nervous system, heal at a cellular level by telling yourself that no, that conditioning and that programming that I was forced to believe is actually a lie because those things about me are not true. That's not true, that's a lie. A lie from the pit of hell, and I renounce it. I rebuke those lies, and then I declare the truth and the word of God over myself. I am a daughter of the king. And the Lord is not angry at us for our dirt and our sin and our brokenness and where we've been, but he is helping us heal those things in a very gentle, loving way so that he can move us towards transformation and freedom. Because I think some people come into Christianity and they're in the pit and they're they're still in their dirt and their brokenness and they cling to Jesus for dear life and they get stuck there. They get stuck clinging to him in a way that doesn't bring fruit. And the reason they're not bearing fruit is because they're refusing to acknowledge the things that he's trying to change. Because if he's convicting something in you, because Christians constantly talk about conviction, if he's bringing conviction, bringing something into the light that he wants to change, he'll grow, transform, but you're just clinging on to him, saying, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I wish I wasn't like this, and then throwing it away and running from it, and then coming back and doing the same thing again. The next time he highlights it, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I wish I wasn't like this. You know, there's no fruit. You're not transforming. Instead, you're saying, show me why. Why am I like this, Lord? When did this begin? Why do I have OCD? For like I have horrible OCD sometimes, and it makes me so anxious. And I I know why, because I was abused. That's where it started. For me as somebody who went through all that trauma and then came into Christianity. This Christian world doesn't feel safe to somebody who has a lot of trauma. It it feels like constant accusation, constant condemnation, constant shame, constant fear, constant confusion, lots of deception, lots of false prophets. It's actually a terrifying space to move through as a trauma survivor. So I do have to stay very close to God and trust him. And I spend a lot of time just worshiping Christian music, praise, and listening to the word of God, journaling and trying to constantly stay grounded and stay stable within my nervous system so that I can hear him, so that I can feel him, because I don't want to get pulled into a tornado, I don't want to get swept into a storm within my own nervous system because I have so much fear sometimes and so much OCD. So I know what it's like to operate from that level, but I also know what it's like for the Lord to give me a ladder and to help me to grow and move out of the pit and climb and climb and climb and transform and change and heal and grow to the point that 80% of my pain is gone. And emotionally I have grown and matured and become who I was always meant to be because I allowed myself to heal. And when the Lord highlights something to me, I don't just try to peel off the slime and feel ashamed of it. Instead, I sit in it, and sometimes it feels like climbing into boiling water. It's uncomfortable and it's painful and it's really difficult to go back into a memory and into the pain and to feel it and to acknowledge it. But there is a version of me in there that needs me, that needs Jesus and needs his love and his healing and his safety and his comfort. And sometimes there's demons in there that are attacking these old parts of me, and that needs to be delivered. So that's why I do it. I'm willing to climb into my pain and face it so that I can heal her, these parts of me that still need healing, and I can cast out anything that is harming me, and then he gives me a ladder and I grow again and I grow and I level up and I level up and I level up, and that's what's missing. That's the bridge. You have to bridge that gap. If you're not bridging that gap, then you're staying stuck and you're just using Jesus as a blanket. And that's not necessarily always a bad thing. Sometimes people just need rest, they just need peace, they need safety for a while. When you first come home to Jesus, there could be a period of rest. I know for me, I didn't do any healing for the first six months or so when I became born again because I was exhausted and I was reacting to medication. I had gone through a season of trying really hard to heal myself from this medication reaction, and I was just so tired and so broken, and I honestly thought I was dying. So the Lord, I literally just rested in him during that time, and that can be a really beautiful season. But then there has to be an element of change and transformation and growth because you can't stay a baby Christian forever. You have to grow, you have to sharpen your sword, you have to get into the word, you have to learn his ways, you have to get to know him, you have to be willing to put down the sin and crucify your flesh, but doing so in a way that is healthy, in a way that makes you feel good about yourself when you look in the mirror, not in a way that just feeds shame and fear and confusion and gives the enemy permission to stay. Because the only way that we can truly transform and heal is if we walk over that bridge. Sometimes you're going to find things on the bridge that are messy, that are uncomfortable, that are painful, that trigger fear in you that you want to avoid, you want to run away from. And you're going to face all sorts of sabotage, deception, temptation. The enemy is going to come because he comes to kill, steal, and destroy, and he wants to distract this process. He doesn't want you to heal. He doesn't want you to grow because it's so easy for him to keep you captive when you stay in that early Christian stage instead of evolving. Because once you start to climb the ladder, he's losing access to you and he can no longer attack your mind. He can no longer attack your body. He can no longer trap you in captivity when you are constantly moving forward. The problem with these teachings is Christianity starts to feel like a weight and Jesus starts to feel heavy. And Jesus explicitly said, My yoke is easy and my burden is light. In in the book of Matthew, he says, Come to me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. And I think the problem with these teachings, we see so many people deconstructing from Christianity, so many people leaving the fate. And they're not just leaving the fate, they're leaving Jesus because of these false teachings and these ways that are just so negative, and they keep the nervous system in such fight or flight because you're constantly just trying to pull this slime off, but it it won't leave because it's it's parts of you that need help and support and care and love. It becomes a form of self-abuse, especially if you've gone through abuse in your past. You're you're now becoming your own abuser. Because you're always like, that's wrong, that's sin, that's dirty, that's bad, that's shameful, I'm awful, I'm a horrible person. I wish I wasn't like this. And that is not the heart of Christ. Christ does not whip you like a horse and tell you that you're wrong in every way and that you should just be ashamed of yourself for your sin. Because the truth is as long as we have trauma and pain within us, we are going to need coping mechanisms because we are human. That's who we are. We need ways of seeking comfort and support. And care. And some people are lonely and they seek food or they eat too much sugar or they drink because they can't cope with their anger. Or they may turn to weed because they don't want to be in fight or flight all the time and exhausted. So people are returning to these things as a way to cope with their reality. And you can't take away somebody's coping mechanisms without replacing it with something else. So what the Lord does is he comes in and he heals the wound within, deep within our souls, so that we no longer even desire those things. We're no longer craving the alcohol or the cigarettes or the sugar because he has taken away the pain underneath it all. But sometimes that takes a bit of work. And if you're a Christian that doesn't believe in trauma, doesn't believe in therapy, doesn't believe in occasionally needing outside support, you know, outside of your fate, then you are cutting yourself off from something that is really needed. People do have pain. People do have trauma, people go through trials, they go through hard things because life is messy and complicated, and we are all broken in some way. We all struggle in some way. And even though I've gone through this massive healing journey, I still have days where I wake up anxious. I still have days where I'm dysregulated. I still get triggered by people sometimes. I still need to self-soothe and reassure myself. And I used to do that by smoking like 30 cigarettes a day. Now I do that by looking within and sitting with that discomfort for 10 minutes and reassuring myself that I am safe now, that that was the past, that I'm okay. And if there's any part of me still stuck in the past, I pull them forward and bring them home to me. I upgrade them, I upgrade the nervous system in real time so that I am no longer trapped in the past. Because parts of us can stay stuck there, and then you wonder why you're struggling with this sin and why you can't seem to put it down. It's because you're trying to cope with something that you never processed, you never dealt with, you've never let yourself heal from, or maybe you're still exposed to the trigger. I mean, after I was sexually violated, I was still exposed to the person who did that for years afterwards. That is an extremely difficult thing to live with. And it's normal that we're going to develop these coping mechanisms. We're going to have these unhealthy patterns because they help us survive. They help us cope. They help us function. Because when you're growing up in narcissistic abuse, you can't do right for wrong. You can't be vulnerable. You can't show any signs of weakness. They will eat you alive. These people are wolves. And you have to pretend that you're okay. You have to learn to play the game in order to survive. That's literally the only way to survive in some families or in some church environments is to put on a brave face and pretend you're okay. And you may not be able to do that without having some coping mechanisms and things that help you keep going. That's why some people drink four cups of coffee before they leave the house. And the only way to truly start putting these things down is to make the lifestyle changes, cut off the negative people, start taking steps forward, start healing the soul wounds, heal the trauma, let the Lord bind up those wounds and let him cast out whatever demons are limiting you. And it is a process, it's a journey that we walk through with him. Sometimes it involves very hard choices, but that's how you bridge the gap. That's how you break free. And for me, it hasn't just been one or two things. It's been multi-layered, it's been lifestyle changes, diet changes coming off all medication because I have a genetic mutation that makes me very sensitive to medication. And I have had numerous reactions. So the Lord put me on specific supplements. He did so many things to heal me. And I'm so grateful that I went from being so sick, so disabled on death's door, thinking I wasn't going to get to raise my children myself because I was that sick, to now expecting to live a full life, literally praying that I'm going to still be around to help with my grandkids. So the mindset has completely shifted. And now I'm seeing a full life laid out in front of me. And I'm so grateful for how far the Lord has brought me and He has brought me to a place of ease. And even though I still struggle, because you don't go through all of that and not still have some anxiety and stress, but I'm move, I'm still moving forward and I'm facing unfamiliar things every single day in my life. And everything is new to me because I walked away from my family. I left a whole community. Everything I do in my life is new. It's a new step forward. And they're hard steps. But I'm taking them because he walks right beside me and I know that he's leading me exactly where I'm meant to go. So I think the point of this is just recognizing where you're being held captive, where you're staying stuck, and you can't shame yourself out of it. You cannot condemn yourself into the light. You have to recognize that there are roots there. And these are very real human emotions and needs and patterns and coping mechanisms and cycles. And the Lord doesn't think that you're evil for struggling. He wants to just heal that wound and minister to those old old versions of you that are still in pain. And then he's going to help you shift into the best version of you one day at a time. So let's pray. Father, I pray for every person listening to this episode today. I thank you for bringing this into the light. And I thank you for walking with us and helping us to bridge these gaps within our souls. Because you know what our wounds are or pain, what needs healing, what needs to be upgraded and processed, healed, integrated, so that we can become a healthier version of ourselves, a version that feels more whole and safe and free, without the shame, without the fear, without the confusion, without the enemy whispering lies in our ears, because we are made new in you and you make all things new. And we are so grateful that you are a loving father and that you walk with us and you help us to see ourselves through your eyes, and you help us to uproot these lies within us and that voice of condemnation and accusation that sometimes gets so loud. We thank you for removing that and for binding up any spirit that tries to keep us trapped there. Lord, I thank you for all the ways that you have been moving, and I ask that you continue to move in each person's lives so that they can experience your freedom, your joy, your peace, and your love as you lead us further and further into wholeness and completion. In Jesus' name. So I really hope that this teaching helps you today and it just helps give you direction so that you can start to climb and become all that you were always meant to be. And if you need help with this, I do have a full prophetic playlist where there's loads of healings there to help you confront shame and fear and confusion and all the things that we mentioned today. Because I think some of the ways that Christians talk about these things sometimes doesn't lead to that fruit that we are necessarily needing. And instead, it can lead us further into bondage or further into captivity. And we need to be questioning these things and the way these things are taught so that we can become whole again. Because the Lord is holy, he is complete, and he wants us to be walking in his image with him. I thank you all for being here today. Please don't forget to like this video, subscribe, and I will see you in the next one. I love you lots. Bye. Remember to stay close to Jesus because freedom is yours.