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.