Healing the Soul after Religious Abuse: The Dark Heaven of Recovery

by Mikele Rauch

Overview

Recent scandals of clergy sexual abuse have brought attention to the victims and their responses to and recovery from their abuse. But few have considered the effect of the abuse on a victim's soul and religious outlook and beliefs. Healing the Soul after Religious Abuse, offers a unique perspective of recovery and restoration of the soul after religious abuse. The author argues that religious abuse often stops not only psychological growth, but also inward development. The effect is not simply emotional, because the devastation reaches to the core of the spirit. Often there is no place for a God of love or a love of what once was divine. Through a series of personal interviews with persons from the five major religions, Rauch considers various ways that religion can do harm.

The stories told in this book include the road to restoration in the wake of institutional abuse and how inner experience is sometimes confused with religious training; the sacred task of spiritual leadership and how to restore trust when there has been a violation; an exploration of sacrifice and a clarification of the notion of shame; a look at the impact of religious bigotry in the areas of race, sexuality, and tolerance; an overview of sexuality and the place it holds in both celibate and family life; the pernicious issue of clergy sexual abuse and the signs of spiritual trauma in response to such violation; a roadmap for restoration and a challenge to religious institutions; and, lastly, ways to reclaim the sacred and rewire the spirit. Through interviews, research, and personal stories, the author tells a story of recovery of the most delicate kind, offering pathways through the dark night of religious violation to a restoration of the soul and its immense possibilities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780313346705
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	03/20/2009
Series:	Religion, Health, and Healing
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Mikele Rauch is a licensed marriage, family, and child therapist with Brookline Psychological Services dealing with trauma, male and female sexual abuse, and clergy abuse. In 2004, she served on the Victims Rights Committee as a part of an Independent Review Board overseeing the Catholic Church's policies and procedures regarding survivors of clergy sexual abuse. She is a psychotherapist specializing in psychotherapy with male and female survivors of physical, sexual, and clergy abuse. She is a member of MaleSurvivor, the National Organization against Male Sexual Victimization and its International Retreat Team. She has written for the Missouri Review, the National Catholic Reporter, Cross Currents Magazine, Healing Ministry, and The New Therapist.

Table of Contents

Series Foreword
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1 Introduction: The Nightmare of Light
Chapter 2 Trouble in the House of God: Trauma and the Life Cycle
Chapter 3 Hells Prayer Room: When Religion Is the Abuser
Chapter 4 Spiritual Leadership and the Trance of Religious Power
Chapter 5 The Blood of Angels: Psychological and Physical Abuse in the Name of God
Chapter 6 This Is My Body: When Religious Violate in the Name of GodSexual and Ritual Abuse
Chapter 7 The Water You Want: Recovery in Four Directions
Chapter 8 The Water of Life
Resources
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography

What People are Saying About This

Carol Lee Flinders

"In Healing the Soul After Religious Abuse, Mikele Rauch has constructed a tremendous gift to the men, women, and children affected directly or indirectly by religious abuse. The full impact of this groundbreaking, immensely eloquent book has to do not just with the author's intimate and deeply nuanced understanding of religious abuse, but the radiant significance she attaches to religiousness itself. If she persuades her reader that religious abuse can cut into the very foundation of self, it is because she has already persuaded him in one powerful narrative after another, most poignantly her own, that the longing for light, life, truth, and connection we associate with religious impulses lies at the very core of human being—is definitive of who we are. There is a real bodhi-sattva spirit moving through this book."

Mike Lew

"This book is, by turns, clinical observation, memoir, essay, and epic. It is universal and deeply personal, general and specific, prose and poetry, Western and Eastern, Catholic and secular, traditional and new-age, clear and confusing, open, pained and relieved, comforting and challenging-and always loving and touching. Thus, it is much like its author, and could not have been written by anyone else. Read it. You may not like all of it, but you will not dismiss it easily or soon forget it."

Huston Smith

"This is a dark book—suffering is not sunshine—but almost paradoxically, it is crisply written and a page turner."