Out of the Storm

Development of CPTSD in Childhood => Other => Causes => Religious/Cult Abuse => Topic started by: woodsgnome on August 05, 2017, 03:06:44 PM

Title: Book Review: Sacred Wounds, by Teresa B. Pasquale
Post by: woodsgnome on August 05, 2017, 03:06:44 PM
I recently ran across an excellent read that's helped me to lift the fog surrounding the pain still reverberating in my darkest places. Teresa Pasquale's "Sacred Wounds: A Path to Healing from Spiritual Trauma" has helped me in picking up the pieces and moving on from those intensely traumatic times.

As someone whose cptsd experience emanated from circumstances within and around the FOO's involvement with a church and its 2 schools, this book resonates big-time with me. Pasquale knows the territory well, and while much of the cptsd background is well-known to readers of this site and forum, she lays out the basics, using examples from her own life as well as years of service as a counselor and therapist specializing in spiritual abuses. One note--she sticks to using the more-familiar ptsd tag (without the c) which I suppose saved her a bit of explanation. But it's obvious she's covering more of the cptsd landscape as a whole.

Overall, hers is a well-rounded, very readable study into the territory behind the curtain of so-called spirituality gone awry, or even berserk. As with other reads that touch so many of my personal sore points, I had to pause frequently to relieve the inner turmoil certain topics brought up; to absorb it  without 'losing it'.

Pasquale weaves her personal story with those of many others in diving beneath the ugly reality of spiritual abuses. Even if some of the abuse originated as benign hurt by those feeling they were only serving a good cause, I'm sorry; there's never any excuse for how they twist and turn their stated 'godly' good intentions and use it to hurt others, often children placed in their care.

Pasquale's book isn't a rant against religion per se; rather it's a thorough investigation of how something that seems harmless on the surface can end up destroying lives rather than saving them. For those of us suffering from having endured abuse in the name of religion/spirituality, this is a hugely relevant, useful, and sensitive treatment as we find our way out of the carnage left by spiritual abuses.