You are listening to The Place We Find Ourselves podcast. I am Adam Young and I am delighted to be joined today by Dr. Hilary McBride.

Hillary, it's good to see you.

It is so good to see you.

Thanks for having me.

You are so welcome.

You're here in part because you have just written yet another book that is so important. It is titled Holy Hurt, and the

subtitle is Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing. And we want to talk about this

whole category of spiritual trauma, which your book, Holy Hurt, is focused on. And I guess the best place to

start is what do you mean, Hillary, when you talk about spiritual trauma? Okay. What a pleasure

to answer this question, because I think it is worth exploring.

When I say spiritual trauma, I mean a few different things.

I mean the kind of injuries, psychological, relational, existential, sometimes sexual, that people experience in association with spiritual communities, spiritual beliefs, meaning-making systems.

And I really like Michelle Panchuck's definition here.

She says that spiritual trauma is a kind of trauma that's caused by a person or a system or a behavior or a practice closely associated with spirituality or religion,

or that a person believes somehow is the end result of a religious practice,

or somehow the spirituality gets intermingled into the post-traumatic

psychobiological downstream effects.

So there's that, which is the kind of maybe more

obvious definition of this. But when I understand the definition of spirituality in general,

as this kind of inborn drive to make meaning, to connect, to ask questions about what it is that we're doing here,

and to long for a sense of closeness with others, with ourselves, with ultimate reality,

with God. I would argue that every trauma by definition is a form of spiritual trauma because it fractures that ability to feel safe

...