I think maybe the single most tramatized person that i spoke to from marshill basically ended our conversation by saying, i still look back on it as the greatest days of my life, you know? I mean, there's just a depth of complexity there that i feel like i still haven't wrapped my head around entirely, even with my own experience of something similar, to

be honest, this overlaps with, for me, the category of sexual abuse in that, you know, the abuser grooms, and mark was a good grumer, and it gave you access, involvement, meaning power, but also care and intimacy. And in that season there is the sense of bonding, which is what really faith is all about, the capacity to bond in a trusting relationship where we can eternalize goodness. So all that was so attractive and so life giving that when there were these fragmented, dogmatic structures, the benefits that were there were immense. But eventually, what often happens for the abuser is he works to remove a sense of your power. Your power is always under their authority, under their own power. As long as your power is correspondent to what it is their poweris trying to achieve, then i'll let you have power, but the moment you take that power in a different direction. So in that sense, like all abusers, they bond, they groom, then they create a sense in which your life, power and presence only is good to the degree that you're serving somethng of the domain of my purpose. But where it gets really hard, especially in the topic of sexual abuse, is the fact that with your four, whether you are 24, when your body is touched, there will be a rousal. Even if you hate what is happening. There is the sense in which your body betrays you. And if we can use that category with regard to ambilence, like i can see ther terrible things happening, yet there's also wonderful things happening. And in that there is, again, there's grief and loss, but there's also pleasure. And for the victim of sexual abuse, where the shame resides most deeply, itis in the arousal that their body felt. I'm at fault. I chose this. I am actually part of the abuse. Now nothing could be more of a damnable lie than that with regard to sexual abuse. And i also say, for many of the people who are victimized in spiritual abuse, that sense of complicity is not true. The ambilence that you experienced is what your body was intended to experience when the violence of good and evil are, in one sense crossing one another with a degree of violence. So i think so often, in dealing with the matters of marcel, but certainly many other spiritually abusive contects, we don't bring trama as a primary lense, and we don't bring the trama of betrayal, powerlessness and abivolence, particularly with regard to shame, into the reality of what needs to be done on the behalf of those victims to address what needs to occur for their to be ongoing healing.