Against All Odds: Spiritual Abuse and Claiming the Goodness in Disability

By. Lisa Johnson

I've been putting off writing this essay for a while now. After writing my last few pieces on disability a loud voice settled into my head that told me I should focus my writing on something else for a time. It took me a bit to realize that voice was not my own. It was inherited from years of people telling me my disability did not define me. Along with years of people avoiding the discussion of my physical difference. I had internalized the belief that I shouldn't talk about disability too much, if at all. Younger me had learned the topic made people uncomfortable and drew unnecessary attention to myself. So when I recently started writing about my experiences of growing up, and operating in the world, with a disability, it instantly felt like I was drawing too much attention to a part of myself that doesn't fully define me. But even though my disability does not define my whole as an individual, it is the part of myself I have ignored and rejected the most in my life. Hiding, covering, avoiding activities that might expose me, and rejecting the label of "disability" were all behaviors I actively engaged in my youth and through much of my twenties. All that rejection deserves essay after essay to acknowledge the pain and beauty in my previously untold stories. Now as I tiptoe closer to my thirties I want to yell from the mountaintop how proud I am to be a disabled woman who has found her voice and her sense of identity.

So, if everything I write from here until my deathbed is about disability it still won't be enough. I'm just making up for lost time.

The lost time I'm talking about can be traced all the way back to my childhood. A time of beautiful bliss and unacknowledged naiveté. Silence surrounded my disability. Very few people directly spoke about my limb difference. This reinstated for me, that my disability was a conversation to be left off the table. I didn't entirely mind this intentional ignorance. It let me hide and blend in with everyone else. The turmoil of beginning to see my disability as a negative only took place in religious settings where I was pointed out as the person who needed physical healing. I remember how jarring it was to realize the church was telling me I was perfectly created by a loving God, but I was also created physically broken and in need of healing.

Just imagine living your whole childhood trying to blend in and convince yourself you are just like everyone else only to be made a spectacle of by a spiritual leader who believed it was their God-given gift to be able to fix you, or has they put it, "to be a conduit of God's healing power".

It was sitting in Sunday school classrooms and youth group sermons where I learned I was not fully whole, but rather a broken individual in need of fixing. I can't tell you how many times I heard a sermon on physical healing that would end with the parable of the man with the withered hand being healed. The moment I heard the beginning of that story my heart would start racing, I would imagine being anywhere else in the world, and I would stare at the floor so as not to accidentally make eye contact with the pastor and inadvertently give them the impression I wanted to be called upon for healing. Sadly, it didn't matter whether I looked at them or not. As the music started to play softly in the background and the pastor started asking individuals who wanted healing to come to the front, I would purposely stare at the ground for as long as I could. However, like clockwork, someone would eventually come up to me and let me know God had directly spoken to them and conveyed that tonight was the night I was to be healed. They would then grab my fully-formed, right arm, and lead me to the altar for prayer. And like the good, passive, christian woman I was, I would obediently follow. All the while, internally I would wonder why God didn't speak those words to me? I would wonder why it felt so uncomfortable to be a recipient of God's direct calling? It would only be many years later that I would learn those words had felt so terrifying being pushed on me because they had come from the depths of man's ego and inferiority, not from a divine higher power.

I feel it is important for me and my childhood experience to take a moment and be vulnerable enough to explain how looking back and remembering this story still causes my body to shake, my heart to beat faster, and my eyes to fill with tears. All this time later, and the memories still elicit the same intense anxiety and old, shame wounds when I remember the feelings of being taken advantage of in the name of God and spirituality. These feelings and automatic responses are the reasons why I write this story. I write it for my own internal healing and processing, but I also write it in hopes that the awareness of this harm breaks the perpetuation of spiritual abuse for individuals living with a disability. My hope is that no more children will have to feel this deep-seated shame of their unique bodies and their individual existence. 

But if you already have felt this shame, I hope you now know you are whole and you do not need fixing. It is them -- the ones who projected their own brokenness and inadequacies onto you, who deeply long for their own sense of wholeness and healing. It was never your job to be the vat that unwilling contained their fears and feelings of being unworthy. It wasn't my job. It wasn't our job. And it still isn't.

The voice and strength I now contain yearn to return to those pews, classrooms, and camps of my childhood to inform the spiritual leaders that I was not the one needing fixing, but rather, their time would be better spent addressing their own needs to feel powerful and spiritual and mightier than the "poor disabled children". I see their humanness and their humanity. I acknowledge their unprocessed desire for community and belonging. My hope is that they eventually found what they needed in a way that opened themselves to be vulnerable rather than manipulating others into a vulnerable position. And with that, it is important for me to be able to honestly say I was used in these religious situations to be made into the object others believed God wanted to heal. I will no longer hold onto the belief that I needed healing, nor the belief that it was my fault that healing never came to me. Because, to be honest, I never believed it would anyway. Somewhere deep down I knew I was just as I should be. And to be used in this way did not come from a place of others wanting me to feel whole. If it did, I don't believe I would have felt the blanket of shame and inferiority with which I always left those settings. It was never my choice to be prayed over to be healed. Thinking back on this I see how I never volunteered myself for these healing prayers. Somehow, I already intrinsically felt I was whole and didn't need to be altered in any way.  

Remembering this makes me incredibly proud of my younger self. She persevered and found her worth against all odds.

Lisa Johnson is a disability and mental health advocate. She is passionate about bringing visibility to disability. Lisa holds a Masters in Counseling Psychology and uses this background to influence her writing, which focuses on the Mind + Body connection, as well as the importance of personal story work.