Coming Back From Betrayal Trauma

With COVID-19 mostly in our rearview mirror, the great church member reshuffle that followed the pandemic, racial unrest and the 2020 election have settled down, giving pastors a better sense of what their new “normal” looks like. Indeed, 2023 data from Barna Group shows pastors to be less distressed, more hopeful, more confident in their calling, and more satisfied with their ministry than just a year earlier. And, 2024 seems to have been less stressful for many pastors.

However, one significant area in which pastors still feel bruised by the events of 2020 is the sudden, hurtful and often unexplained departure of close friends from their church. This past year, pastors and ministry leaders studying healthy and spiritual leadership with me as part of their Wheaton College doctor of ministry program were most animated in talking about therapist and life coach Anita Phillips’ work with “betrayal trauma.”

These pastors related how they are still reeling from the departure of so many people, including friends and longtime church members, as a result of the events of 2020. Almost to a person, these leaders poured out to each other how hard it has been to have people they did life with, prayed with, cried with, not be there one day. Many shared the very real pain they experienced when those they thought would be lifelong friends just left or, worse still, turned on them as they were going out the door. For some grieving and bewildered pastors the break was complete, with people refusing to talk with them, going so far as to block their texts and calls.

Even as ministry is getting easier as time passes, the devastation caused by these broken relationships continues. As a professor of psychology and leadership, I’m not surprised these relational losses ache now years later. It’s not just the loss but how these relationships were broken that causes the trauma to continue. After all, people are always coming in and out of each other’s lives. Marriages, jobs or relocations can take people away from us. In these cases, we understand, even while grieving, the reasons why they are gone.

But with betrayal trauma, the departure not only caused grief but wounding—even if that was not the intention of those who inflicted the hurt.

Understanding Betrayal Trauma

Betrayal trauma, by definition, is an overwhelming cognitive, biological, emotional and spiritual response to broken relationships that are outside of our control. Psychologist Jennifer Freyd originally coined the term in the 1990s to describe the clinical condition experienced by children who have been sexually abused by loved ones whom they trusted, not only causing physical harm but leaving psychological, cognitive and emotional scars.

As serious and as grievous as those situations are, betrayal trauma is an apt description for any significant relational hemorrhage caused by a trusted person who disrupts the life functioning of another in both unexpected and unacceptable ways. The American Psychological Association defines a disturbing experience to be traumatic if it is intense enough to result in “any significant fear, helplessness, confusion, uncertainty or other lingering disruptive feelings … [that] often challenge an individual’s view of the world as a just, safe and predictable place.”

Psychiatrist Bruce Perry, who works with abused children, writes that trauma can have big “T” and little “t” causes. As you would expect, big “T” traumatic events are horrendous physical and psychological acts that clearly leave physical, emotional, psychological or relational scars. However, little “t” causes are no less valid since there is no specific cutoff across the spectrum of severity that would warrant labeling the outcome of some events as traumatic and others with a lesser category of grief, fear or sadness. Trauma doesn’t reside in the event. Instead, it resides within the person who experienced it.

It also doesn’t just affect feelings. Betrayal trauma is so intense because, along with negative emotions, it leads to long-term rumination and not-so-healthy behavioral reactions. These cognitive/behavioral responses don’t always come to the fore when thinking about trauma. Still, they’re important if we are to understand why such relational breaks are so intense and lasting. In addition to the grief, they shake both our sense of trust and vulnerability.

Dealing With the Aftermath

Several pastors and Christian leaders were kind enough to talk to me confidentially about their experiences with interpersonal betrayal. Without knowing what each other had said, their stories shared three common threads.

First, those who broke off fellowship did so in anger because the person who shared the story with me—in this case their pastors—had refused to take some action on their behalf. The break wasn’t so much over what they had done but what they had left undone. For example, the pastor had not agreed with the intensity of their concerns, had not been transparent enough, hadn’t fired or hired someone, hadn’t given a specific sermon, or hadn’t spoken out against what the person leaving thought was an important issue in the church, community, culture or country. Those who left did not get the bulwark from their church against what they saw as the world shifting beneath them.

Second, while some families quietly faded away, most had one conversation with someone in leadership, which would be both the first and final time they raised their concerns, making it clear that they had already made up their minds to go. As one pastor framed it, you could tell from the beginning of the meeting that it would entail face-to-face conflict rather than shoulder-to-shoulder comradery meant to solve the issue. There was simply no attempt by those leaving to follow the process of biblical reconciliation found in Matthew 5 and 18.

Third, and perhaps most painfully, those who left didn’t see their issue as a disagreement over political ideology or non-creedal theology but reflected something deeper, namely the pastor’s faith, competence and character. The fact that the pastor didn’t see the same problems was evidence enough of their shortcomings, lack of boldness or vision. Some of those who were leaving were set on burning their church down, convinced that their pastor’s refusal to honor their request was evidence of some deeper rot in their church. Often, these soon-to-be ex-friends were more than willing to encourage others to follow them out the door.

The pain, uncertainty and anxiety of such rebukes and abandonment, especially with no shared reality, can indeed be profoundly traumatizing as they not only affect the heart but also lead to an existential crisis of second-guessing one’s sense of reality. Pastors didn’t just lose their friends, they no longer felt they knew themselves fully.

God has made us relational people with a level of fluidity between “we and I” among those closest to us. We understand ourselves, in part, by the company we keep. When those closest to us unexpectedly exit our lives, we have to rebuild our identity, or how we think about ourselves vis-à-vis others. With their friends’ departures, pastors have had to recalibrate the very real cost of spiritual intimacy in doing life together.

They also have to rebuild their self-confidence, often wondering how they could have been so clueless about the people with whom they had shared their most private selves. To a person, those I talked to replayed different scenarios in their heads, wondering what they could have done differently to maintain the friendships and keep people in fellowship. It’s one thing to regret doing something, but there are many roads to take when evaluating not taking an action.

Should they have just given in and done what was asked of them? Could they have done something else? Were their positions, processes and boundaries not clear enough? Should they have seen the writing on the wall earlier? Are they discipling their flock well? Did they share something in confidence with these newly former friends they deeply regret?

For people who love seeing their impact on lives changed through the gospel of Jesus Christ, the uncertainty caused by these events profoundly affected their day-to-day flourishing. To say that they experienced trauma, and more specifically betrayal trauma, is not an overstatement.

Feeling Fragile

Trust takes time to build but can be shattered by a single event. People become trustworthy over time when they demonstrate three characteristics, the first two being competency and integrity. Because trustworthy people know what they are doing and behave in ways consistent with their moral framework, their actions are consistent and thus predictable. We trust them because there are no surprises.

The third attribute is benevolence, which is more than mere kindness. Trustworthy people have the backs of others for no personal benefit. Without benevolence in times of need, seemingly trustworthy people can shatter the trust that might have taken years to build. For each person I interviewed, the absence of benevolence from their friends, more so than a lack of competence or integrity, was the attribute that crushed them.

When believers break trust, it not only rends relationships but emaciates the body of Christ when we no longer feel safe enough to be vulnerable in ways we thought were God-honoring in the past. Vulnerability is a two-edged sword. Social science research shows that being vulnerable with those we trust can lead to greater life satisfaction, flourishing and feeling safe with others. However, when trust is broken, vulnerability can have the opposite effect, making us more fragile, fearful and even depressed.

Pastors and their spouses talked about the fear and anxiety they would feel when they ran into former members in the neighborhood. How do you greet someone who no longer talks to you? Why does it still hurt when you see them avoiding your glance at the other end of the supermarket aisle? Why does your body want to run the other way?

This last question—why we have a gut reaction to flee—is another reason why trauma is so very difficult to extinguish, even with traditional talk therapy. Our bodies are wonderfully and fearfully made so that when traumatic events occur they are processed rapidly through the amygdala, a structure buried in the center of the brain, which quickly sends messages down the central nervous system to create an immediate full-body response of fight, flight or freeze. However, it bypasses the frontal lobe, which could have processed the event with a more complex conscious understanding if there had been more time and less anxiety.

But even afterward, traumatic experiences are not necessarily woven into neural networks in the front of the brain where thought and memory occur. Recent studies of PTSD show that the incidents causing such damaging responses tend to remain just above the amygdala in the area where daydreaming occurs, never entirely turning into memories where they could be processed by the frontal lobe and cataloged as something that happened in the past.

These primitive emotional and cognitive reactions reinforce each other, making us hypersensitive to real or perceived threats. Often, when we overreact with seemingly inappropriate emotions or thoughts, it can feel like we are having an out-of-body experience with our frontal lobe wondering, Where did that come from? Our reactions to those around us can appear to be out of whack, whether it’s being quieter in staff meetings, finding ourselves giving an over-snappy response to a reasonable question, easily crying or experiencing sudden gut-punching fear when we see former friends at a restaurant.

Betrayal trauma is hard to extinguish because our brains can remain on hyperalert for years to ward off another round of crippling vulnerability. It is no surprise that in spring 2024, Barna found that only 37% of pastors reported satisfaction with their mental health.

Healing Your Heart

There is no easy way to overcome betrayal trauma. Because it sits in the more primitive parts of our brain, we simply can’t talk ourselves out of it even when we know the causes. However, we can calm down the rapid firing of the amygdala over time by paying attention to our thoughts, behaviors and emotions, especially when memories of the most anxious interactions trigger us.

First, understand that the people who left were likely experiencing their own small “t” trauma. They were probably reacting to their own anxiety with a fight-and-flight response. Picking a fight with their pastor and then leaving fits this pattern. People are biased toward expecting big causes to explain big problems. In psychology, we call this proportionality bias. We want to believe that tragic outcomes must have a disastrous reason behind them. So, people often imagine darker causes at the root of an issue. This is why people are easily drawn to conspiracy theories, being motivated to believe that there is something far more nefarious going on when pastors disagree with them. Forgiveness might mean understanding that their behavior was not entirely rational but stemmed from a place of vulnerability soaked in anxiety, fear and sorrow.

Even as you find it possible to become kinder to those who left, it’s important to be kinder to yourself. Fight and flight are not just instantaneous responses to trauma but can turn into long-term dysfunctional ways to function. In this case, “fighting” might mean doubling down on ministry work to prove one’s worth or orthodoxy. One pastor told me that when a couple of good friends left, he started working more hours, driving his staff even harder. It took him about a year to recognize that this wasn’t a heroic surrender to God as much as a triggered response to his grief.

The long-term consequences of flight can include withdrawing from others. Most notably, this might mean leaving your church or even quitting the ministry. That may be the right thing to do for other reasons, and I recommend Henry Cloud’s 2011 book, Necessary Endings, to think through that decision. But please know that the effects of trauma don’t end once you leave. Because trauma resides within individuals rather than an event, we take our trauma with us.

Like the daydream aspects of PTSD, even if we find ourselves in a new position, we can still relive anxious events or relitigate difficult conversations on any given day as a subconscious form of multitasking, barely aware that we are constantly replaying these memories as we wished they would have turned out. There are therapies directed toward the amygdala, such as cognitive-behavioral desensitization therapy and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), that can weaken memories that seem to be on infinite loops, but changing locations where memories are no longer anchored in reality can actually make their intrusiveness worse. You can’t outrun trauma.

Pastors told me how they don’t think it will be possible for them to be as vulnerable with others at church. I get it and think that needs to be honored (for now). But being made in the image of the trinitarian God, we need deep friendships. Developing trusting friendships outside your ministry, denomination or church network can be a balm for your soul. Find friends who don’t care that you’re a pastor.

I’ve been in Christian higher education as a professor and administrator for 30 years. I’ve also been part of local running and swimming clubs for two decades. Those folks know I am a Christian, but most don’t quite understand my vocation. Yet we have walked alongside each other through disease, divorce, dementia and death. These friendships are dear to me because my friends don’t know me by a role or a title. In many ways, I am my most authentic self with them. Building trusting relationships unrelated to your role can be a first step back toward vulnerability.

Next, be kinder to yourself by listening to your emotions to understand the circumstances in which you are most likely to be triggered. Pastors reported feeling stabbed in the back. While this is obviously metaphorical, there can be real pain in trauma because it is a full-bodied experience—an achiness sometimes accompanied by GI issues, rashes or insomnia. You also might be experiencing shame that you couldn’t stop this break. Yet this is not unique to you, and there is probably very little you could have done to stop it.

Don’t beat yourself up or put yourself in situations likely to cause an overly anxious response. We can’t “gut it out” when faced with anxious situations. Our bodies keep the score when we don’t listen to them, releasing cortisol and other hormones that are important in emergencies but can cause damage if we are always in a heightened state. It will get easier, but we must be aware that our bodies work on their own timetables.

Finally, God’s grace is greater than our grief. As painful as trauma can be, it is redeemable. People who have gone through trauma often come through the experience with greater resilience for the next round of life stressors, experiencing what psychologists call post-traumatic growth. They can develop a deeper appreciation for simple things and forge stronger relationships with those closest to them. They also tend to have greater empathy with others who have gone through traumatic events. In Romans 5:3–4, Paul wrote about the inner strength and more profound faith that can be the gift of grace through trauma, reminding us that “we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.”

Betrayal trauma is real and all too prevalent among pastors and ministry leaders in this season. So, too, is its pain. When we ignore it or try to power through it, we inadvertently prolong the heightened anxiety it causes. But being aware of it, understanding how it lingers in the more primitive parts of our brain, and seeing its long-lasting effects on emotions, thoughts, behaviors and friendships will help with healing.

While it hurts to have friends walk away, working through the experience of betrayal trauma can make us more resilient, draw us closer to loved ones, make us better friends, and deepen our dependence on God. As with so much else in life, God can redeem it for his good purposes.