When Spirituality Becomes Gaslighting

Many people come to spirituality seeking comfort, meaning, and healing. They are often searching for safety after pain, connection after loss, or guidance after confusion. At its best, spirituality can support deep healing, nervous system regulation, and a reconnection with our inner wisdom.

But at its worst, spirituality can become a subtle form of gaslighting.

In this article, I want to explore when spiritual language stops supporting healing and starts silencing pain—and how we can reclaim a trauma-informed spirituality rooted in truth, compassion, and nervous system safety.

This is not an attack on spirituality, religion, or faith. It is an invitation into discernment.

What Is Spiritual Gaslighting?

Gaslighting occurs when someone’s reality, emotions, or lived experience is dismissed or reframed in a way that causes them to doubt themselves. When this happens through spiritual language, it can be especially harmful because it targets not only the mind, but the soul.

Spiritual gaslighting often sounds like:

• “Everything happens for a reason.”
• “Just send love and light.”
• “Forgive and move on.”
• “You chose this for your soul’s growth.”
• “This is all part of the divine plan.”

These phrases are not always harmful in themselves. In some contexts, they may even feel comforting. The harm arises when they are used to override pain, silence emotions, or protect harm rather than address it.

When spiritual language is used to dismiss suffering instead of witnessing it, the nervous system does not feel safe. And without safety, healing cannot occur.

How Spiritual Gaslighting Affects the Nervous System

From a trauma-informed perspective, healing is not primarily a cognitive or moral process—it is a nervous system process.

When someone experiences trauma, especially relational trauma, their nervous system learns to detect threat and respond through survival patterns such as hypervigilance, freeze, collapse, or dissociation.

When spiritual communities respond to pain with bypassing language, several things happen internally:

• The person’s emotions are invalidated.
• Their body learns that expressing pain is unsafe.
• Their intuition is overridden by external authority.
• Shame replaces self-trust.

Over time, this teaches the nervous system that connection to God, Spirit, or community is conditional—dependent on suppressing one’s authentic experience.

This is not spiritual growth.
This is conditioning.

Toxic Positivity in Spiritual Spaces

One of the most common forms of spiritual gaslighting is toxic positivity—the insistence on “high vibration,” constant forgiveness, or emotional transcendence without integration.

Toxic positivity teaches people to:

• Ignore anger, grief, or fear
• Rush toward forgiveness before safety
• Bypass accountability in the name of “love”
• Interpret pain as spiritual failure

But emotions are not obstacles to spirituality.
They are messengers.

Anger can signal boundary violations.
Grief can signal loss and love.
Fear can signal the need for protection or support.

When we silence emotions in the name of spirituality, we silence the body’s wisdom.

Forgiveness Without Accountability Is Not Healing

Forgiveness is often misunderstood and misused in spiritual contexts.

True forgiveness cannot be coerced.
It cannot be rushed.
And it cannot replace safety or accountability.

When survivors are pressured to forgive before:

• their pain is witnessed
• their nervous system is regulated
• boundaries are established
• accountability is addressed

…the result is not healing—it is re-traumatization.

From a trauma-informed lens, forgiveness must be self-directed first, not imposed externally. Healing begins with honoring one’s own experience, not absolving someone else of harm prematurely.

Spirituality that protects abusers by reframing harm as “lessons” or “divine plans” is not spiritually mature—it is spiritually avoidant.

How Language Can Protect Harm—or Heal It

Language matters because it shapes how the nervous system interprets experience.

Healing language:

• Validates emotional reality
• Supports nervous system regulation
• Encourages agency and choice
• Holds compassion and accountability

Harmful spiritual language:

• Shifts responsibility onto the survivor
• Minimizes or reframes abuse
• Discourages boundaries
• Creates shame around normal trauma responses

A trauma-informed spirituality asks not:
“What does this mean spiritually?”
but first:
“What does this feel like in the body?”
“What does this nervous system need right now?”

Reclaiming a Trauma-Informed Spiritual Path

Healing spirituality does not ask you to abandon discernment.
It does not demand blind faith.
And it does not require you to override your body.

Instead, it supports:

1. Validation

Your feelings are real. They are not a spiritual failure.

2. Boundaries

You get to choose when, how, and with whom you engage spiritually or personally.

3. Discernment

Not all spiritual guidance is safe for all nervous systems.

4. Integration

Healing includes emotion, sensation, memory, and meaning—not just belief.

5. Embodied Truth

Spirituality should feel grounding, expansive, and regulating—not contracting or fear-based.

Signs a Teaching May Not Be Safe for You

Your body often knows before your mind does.

If a spiritual teaching creates:

• fear
• urgency
• shame
• contraction
• self-doubt
• pressure to bypass pain

…that is information, not resistance or failure.

From a trauma-informed perspective, this often means something within the psyche or nervous system is asking to be witnessed—not overridden.

Spiritual Growth Does Not Disconnect Us From Reality

True spirituality does not require dissociation.
It does not demand perfection.
And it does not separate us from our humanity.

Authentic spiritual growth:

• deepens embodiment
• increases self-trust
• strengthens boundaries
• expands compassion without self-erasure

It helps us inhabit our lives more fully—not escape them.

An Invitation, Not a Doctrine

Nothing shared here is meant to be absolute truth.
It is not meant to replace therapy, medical care, or your own discernment.

This is an invitation to explore spirituality through a lens that honors:

• nervous system safety
• lived experience
• personal sovereignty
• embodied wisdom

You are the authority of your own experience.

Continuing the Journey

If you are navigating religious trauma, spiritual confusion, or the quiet sense that “something about this doesn’t feel right,” you are not broken.

You may simply be waking up to a deeper, more embodied truth.

My book, The Divine Within: Healing Ourselves to Heal the World, explores healing through a trauma-informed, spiritually grounded lens that bridges spirituality, psychology, and neuroscience. It offers practices to help you reconnect with your body, regulate your nervous system, and reclaim your inner wisdom. Available on Amazon, Walmart, Barnes and Noble and several other online platforms.

You can also find resources, mentorship, and additional teachings at
www.blossomingheartwellness.com

Take gentle care of yourself.
Your healing deserves patience, truth, and compassion.

With deep respect for your journey,
Allison Batty-Capps

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