You're listening to the Allender Center podcast with Dr. Dan Allender.

This week, Dan and I, Rachel Clinton, discuss how spiritual abuse shames and manipulates our bodies,

often forcing us to dissociate and split off the parts of us that are wise and kind and curious.

What does it look like to begin reclaiming the truth that our bodies and our whole selves

are created in the image of God?

As we enter the topic of what happens in spiritually abusive worlds with regard to bodies,

I have not looked forward to this particular one because I have so many people I've had the privilege to work with

who have been sexually abused in churches, parochurch organizations, in religious

settings of one sort or another.

And I just have to say that all abuse is evil and all abuse breaks at the heart of anyone

who engages.

But when it involves a spiritual, so-called leader,

taking advantage of his or her position

to access the heart and body of Jesus' beloved,

there's something in me that both wants to weep, but I also say wants to rage.

Like I could, I often have this fantasy if I'm dying of cancer and I've got about a month or two to

live. Who am I going to kill? And I've known of many abusers. And it's that category. But it's not the so-called,

whatever this word means, so-called secular abusers. It's the Christian abusers who have used

faith as the context to do the mind control, which is bad enough, deeply bad enough.

But somehow when it then crosses into the boundary of violating the body of another, I can feel my body even as I talk.

I'd like to kill. And I don't call that righteous. I don't want to

valorize it. But I also want to say it is where I believe Jesus says these words, it would be better

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