The Particulars of Spiritual Abuse: Mind Control and Loyalty

The Allender Center Podcast

The Allender Center

Psychology, Religion & Spirituality, Mental Health, Christianity, Trauma, Health & Fitness, Theology

4.6 • 628 Ratings

🗓️ 14 August 2020

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Last year, Rachael Clinton Chen and Dr. Dan Allender dove into a series on the dynamics of spiritual abuse and forms of trauma that can emerge in situations of spiritual abuse. This week, we’re sharing with you their conversation about some of the particulars of spiritual abuse including mind control, dogmatism, suspicion, and loyalty. One of the first categories you’ll hear them unpack is mind control, including the implications and consequences of abusive mind control which distorts desire for attunement in order to grow suspicion and mistrust.

All of these systems and categories, however, are ultimately about control—structuring power and authority in such a way that spiritually abusive leaders have total control over the minds and bodies of those in their communities. Ultimately, though, Dan and Rachael invite us back to that which spiritual abuse most fundamentally sabotages: hope.

Resources:

Listen to an episode of the podcast where Dan and Rachael address listener questions about spiritual abuse.
Read a blog post, “Dogma, Abuse, and Embodied Theology”

Read a blog post, “Tuning in to the Unseen”

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for listening to the Allender Center podcast.
0:06.7	I'm Dr. Dan Allender.
0:08.7	And I'm Rachel Clinton-Centen.
0:10.5	We're fiercely committed to providing hope and healing to a fragmented world.
0:14.7	And restoration for the heart.
0:17.2	Thank you for joining us.
0:18.5	Let's get this conversation started.
0:28.3	Thank you for joining us. Let's get this conversation started. My dear friend and colleague, Rachel Clinton.
0:32.8	And I'm Dan Alamander. Hey, that feels more like radio than almost anything we've done.
0:38.6	Nonetheless, this is a really important topic.
0:41.5	One we go into with a, I hope people here each and every time we do any podcasts,
0:49.5	that there has been thought, reflection, prayer.
0:52.0	But there's a sense in which this is just so big.
0:55.3	When you violate someone spiritually from our advantage,
1:01.1	you're dealing with some of the very core, core of who a person is.
1:05.2	And as we weave this material,
1:07.9	I also want to say there are very, very few times where spiritual abuse does not also
1:14.3	include some dimension of, and again, when I say sexual abuse, it may not be direct physical
1:20.2	touch, but it often is, but at least it's some degree of verbal, visual, and some form of violation of the body. So what we're going to do
1:30.6	through this series is to deal with probably more severe forms of abuse, and it will be important
1:37.7	for some of our listeners to ratchet it back down rather than simply say dismissively,
1:43.9	I wasn't harmed that way. And it's not that
	...

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