When Trauma Warps Your View of God—And How to Heal

“My mother used to hold my hand over a red-hot stove and tell me that’s how hot hell will be,” Elizabeth* told me during our first meeting (*changed for confidentiality). “And if I ever lied, she would tell me that the Bible says lying is like the sin of witchcraft, so I must be a witch.”

As Elizabeth shared memories of growing up in a spiritually abusive home, she could hardly keep the tears from flowing. She had been through years of therapy, but she continued to live in crippling fear of God.

It is almost inevitable that we project onto God the weaknesses and terrors of our earthly caregivers. From our earliest moments, when our tender brains lack the ability to conceptualize an invisible God, we see our parents. Through our interactions with them, we begin to define what love means. For a traumatized child, “love” is easily distorted. As we grow, our perception of God remains shaped by these interactions with our caregivers, for good or for evil.

And it is not only those with severe and complex traumas who develop warped views of God. There are many Christians who dismiss the term “trauma” as too serious to describe their own stories, yet there’s something that holds them back from full spiritual freedom.

“Chronic emotional adversity” is another term that describes something less severe than trauma, something that is not necessarily abusive, but it introduces ongoing, long-term emotional distress. When I accompany someone on their journey of spiritual healing, I often encounter damaged views of God that can be traced back to situations such as the following:

• Growing up in a home where love is conditional
• Growing up under extreme religious perfectionism
• Living with an emotionally volatile parent
• Experiencing chronic emotional neglect
• Experiencing chronic criticism or belittling
• Growing up with an emotionally manipulative parent
• Repeated betrayals by caregivers
• Being scapegoated, or being expected to be the “perfect child”

A journey with God that is filled with fear, striving, and a chronic lack of peace is an invitation to look deeper into our own past, and deeper into the heart of God. What if God isn’t as threatening and dreadful as our minds portray Him to be?

If you feel that your deepest, most subconscious way of relating to God isn’t what it could be, here are three steps you can take to begin healing.

The first step to healing is recognizing the human propensity to project onto God the realities of our earthly caregivers. Our Heavenly Father is not your earthly father, or your earthly mother, or your abusive siblings, or your critical grandparents. He is Abba, Father. He is the Wellspring of Love, the Source of All Goodness, the Beginning and End of all true affection. There is healing when we recognize how our wounds are obscuring the heart of God.

Once, as I was listening to a man describe his childhood experiences, I asked how these realities might have contributed to his fear-based relationship with God, and he suddenly stopped in shock. “I can’t believe it!” He exclaimed at the discovery, “I’ve created God in the image of my mother!”

We must repeatedly remind ourselves of the vast distance between those who have hurt us and the God who heals us. God’s not like that, we can tell ourselves, over and over until the truth about His heart takes deeper root.

Meditating on the heart of God is the surest antidote for healing a distorted “God lens.” We can best do this through calm, sustained readings of Scripture. It is in the Bible that we see God’s mercy, God’s tenderness, God’s sacrificial love in pouring out heaven’s greatest treasure when He gave His only Son.

For some people—such as those with scrupulosity or those who have endured spiritual abuse—Biblical meditation can be a minefield of triggers. One woman who suffers from religious obsessions recently told me, “Whenever I read the New Testament, I feel like Jesus is yelling at me. The promises never seem to apply to me—only the passages about damnation and judgment.”

For anxious, wounded hearts, it’s overly simplistic to recommend biblical meditation without any qualifiers. Here are some guidelines for biblical engagement that I often recommend to individuals with deep spiritual wounds:

1. Meditate on Scripture when you are in your calmest state, not in your most anxious state. While it is intuitive to think that we should read Scripture when we are anxious in order to receive calmness, it can have the opposite effect on some types of anxiety.
   
   
2. Find “safe passages” that do not trigger your anxiety and past memories. Mark these passages as a secure home base, a place where you know you can meditate on God’s heart without having an unexpected uptick of anxiety.

A third step to healing a distorted God lens involves forging new, healthy relationships in the Church—the body of Christ. The mind is a wonderfully malleable place. New, healthy relationships can help train the brain to trust and let down the defenses. Regardless of how someone may have wounded you in the past, God has His chosen people who are willing to channel His divine love to you. The Church is a place where wounded strugglers can safely allow themselves to be seen. When we allow ourselves to be vulnerable—and are met with kindness—that is when the broken, defensive parts of our hearts begin to soften.

For the believer who has suffered trauma, neglect, or chronic emotional adversity, God can seem unnervingly similar to those who have hurt us most. Spiritual pursuits may trigger the very worst anxiety, but the cure for this is not to avoid God. Rather, we must press in closer—trusting that He will draw us into the heart of His love and heal what is broken.   

Depending on the depth of our wounds, some of us may need extra help along the way, and we shouldn’t feel ashamed of that. Our traumas, pains, and losses are inextricably linked to the way we understand God—thus, dealing with the past is a way we can honor Him. Job, after all his traumatic losses and painful rounds of rumination with his friends, came to this conclusion:

I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear,
But now my eye sees You. (Job 42:5)

There is a Love that is deeper than your wounds, stronger than your fears, and truer than the voices that once shaped you. This Love is God Himself. And He invites you to come closer and see Him for who He really is.

Photo by Alex Jones on Unsplash