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<\/a>Reba Riley\u2019s memoir, Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome: A Memoir of Humor and Healing<\/em> <\/a>describes her loss of religious faith in her early 20\u2019s and her subsequent attempt to assemble a meaningful spiritual life for herself.<\/p>\n I was struck by her interview with the Religion News Service<\/em><\/a> because at the time I read it, I had just finished writing my paper for the journal to be published at the conclusion of the World Meeting of Families at which my wife and I are both speaking. \u00a0Riley\u2019s interview read like a case study of the major problem I was describing in the paper; Spiritual Ambivalence.<\/em><\/p>\n Perpetual Wanderers NOT Seekers<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n People often call Millennials afflicted with spiritual ambivalence \u201cseekers\u201d but that\u2019s not entirely true. \u00a0It would be more accurate to say that they are perpetual spiritual wanderers. \u00a0The difference is that seekers\u00a0want<\/em> to find a spiritual home, but for the spiritually ambivalent, the idea of landing in one spiritual place is offensive, restricting, and, besides, \u00a0completely unnecessary. \u00a0 Here is how Riley\u2013who claims to have sampled 30 religions by her 30th birthday\u2013puts it.<\/p>\n \u201cI never set out to find a new religion, but rather to face my spiritual injuries and find healing, all the experiences\u2014from Amish to Sweat Lodge to Pentecostals were not only viable; they were essential to rediscovering my faith. The journey would have been impossible without exploring many religious expressions\u2014including, and maybe especially, Scientology. It was so foreign of an experience that it forced me to ponder questions I\u2019d never thought to ask.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n She recounts an experience with a pastor who challenged her assertion that she was Christian.<\/p>\n \u2026a few months ago a pastor was essentially cross-examining my answer to this question<\/em>\u00a0[ed note: of whether she was Christian]. After forty-five minutes I gently said, \u201cSir, it seems like you\u2019re trying to find out if I am Christian enough for you. If you\u2019re asking if I love Jesus, the answer is \u2018yes.\u2019 If you\u2019re asking if I follow Jesus, the answer is \u2018yes.\u2019 If you\u2019re asking to give me a litmus theology test, I\u2019ll probably fail, because my theology is really quite simple, kinda like Jesus\u2019s: Love God; Love people.\u00a0Love, period.\u201d\u00a0He decided I was Christian enough, but it would\u2019ve been okay with me if he hadn\u2019t.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n The spiritually ambivalent like to believe that they have evolved beyond the tribalistic categories of denomination and doctrine but the research strongly suggests that what what is really going on is a deep-seated fear of spiritual commitment\u2013a fear often rooted in the culture of divorce.<\/p>\n Church Trauma or Divorce Trauma?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n The research of eminent psychologist of religion, \u00a0Dr. Ken Pargament (2011)<\/a>\u00a0shows that the kind of spiritual ambivalence Riley describes is rooted in the family; specifically, in the child\u2019s inability to idealize his parents or other adults in authority in his life (teachers, pastors, coaches, etc). \u00a0This is often the direct spiritual consequence of divorce. \u00a0Of course, all children come to realize, at some point, that adults are fallible, and discovering this is even necessary for a healthy transition to adulthood.\u00a0 But Pargament\u2019s research shows that if this realization comes too soon or in unwelcome ways\u2013because the adults in children\u2019s lives have, for some reason, been experienced as not credible, unavailable, disconnected, distracted, selfish, out-of-touch, neglectful or abusive\u2013children don\u2019t learn whom they can reliably follow or to whom they can consistently turn for guidance\u2013except themselves.<\/em>\u00a0 Ultimately, such a child\u2019s ambivalent attitude toward parental maturity and wisdom is projected onto all institutions charged with helping people find meaning and significance.<\/p>\n Elizabeth Marquardt (2006; 2013)<\/a> observed a similar dynamic in her groundbreaking work on the spiritual lives of children of divorce.\u00a0 Even in so-called \u201cgood divorces\u201d (i.e., low conflict divorces when the children maintain a good relationship with both parents) children are constantly moving back and forth between two\u2013often, very different\u2013worlds (the mother\u2019s and the father\u2019s).\u00a0 These \u201cworlds\u201d never come together in any meaningful way except inside the children\u2019s own heads.\u00a0 Because of this, Marquardt asserts that the majority of adult children of divorce generally struggle with trusting anyone besides themselves to help make sense of life.<\/p>\n Church-Haunted<\/b><\/em><\/p>\n My point here is to not question Riley\u2019s sincerity. \u00a0I respect the journey she\u2019s on. \u00a0Rather, as a professional counselor who practices spiritually-integrated psychotherapy, it\u2019s my to draw from the research and fill in some blanks people in Riley\u2019s position often leave empty. \u00a0Without addressing these blindspots perpetual wanderers like Riley will never find true peace as they continue to attribute their genuine spiritual injuries to the wrong sources. Like\u00a0A Christmas Carol\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0 Jacob Marley, they will remain doomed to walk the earth, constantly carrying the chains that bind them and unable to commit to a spiritual home. \u00a0\u201c<\/b><\/span>I cannot rest, I cannot stay, I cannot linger anywhere\u2026.and weary journeys lie before me!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n It is certainly true that religious groups can be petty, nasty, discriminatory and even traumatizing. \u00a0I don\u2019t mean to deny anything she may or may not have been through in her experiences with institutional churches. \u00a0But the one thing that professional psychologists-of-religion note is that people often misattribute the source of their spiritual wounds. \u00a0They point to X situation with pastor Y or co-religionist Z\u2013and those things may have indeed happened and may have indeed been serious. \u00a0But what makes these church-based experiences traumatic for some but not others is that many individuals who are traumatized by these experiences have already developed spiritual feet of clay because of pre-existing family traumas that have impacted their spiritual development. \u00a0These family traumas often go as unrecognized drivers of spiritual disorders because people fail to make the connection between their relational and spiritual lives\u2013although they are, in fact, deeply connected to and even predictive of each other.<\/p>\n The Plot Thickens<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n When I began this article I hadn\u2019t seen Riley\u2019s book. \u00a0But in light of the above you might imagine that after I read her interview, I said to myself, \u201cThere is no way she is not an adult child of divorce.\u201d \u00a0I had no idea if that was true, but I did a little digging and found that, in fact, my hypothesis was correct. On page 46 of her book she shares a conversation \u00a0in which her mom asks if Riley would have remained in the church of her childhood had her mom and dad hadn\u2019t gotten divorced. Riley states.<\/p>\n \u201cThat was not a question I had expected. \u00a0Their divorce when I was nineteen changed my life, certainly. \u00a0It had broken my ideas about God and family and the world but it\u2019s impact was not a loss of faith: \u00a0My grief caused me to dig deeper into faith. \u00a0It was only later\u2013when I realized I didn\u2019t, I couldn\u2019t, believe in the primary tenets of Christianity\u2013that I walked away. \u00a0And it was the walking away from everything I knew that caused the Breaking (sic).\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n Reading this statement through the lens of the available research, it\u2019s clear that the divorce changed everything. \u00a0Even Riley admits as much although she fails to appreciate the full spiritual significance of her post-divorce spiritual trauma. \u00a0No, the divorce didn\u2019t cause her to immediately run away from her church. \u00a0But it left her feeling like she was the only one she could trust to determine \u201cthe Truth.\u201d \u00a0The spiritual wound caused by her parents divorce t sent her down a path that caused her to reject any spiritual truths \u00a0she couldn\u2019t reconcile exclusively via her own personal perspective and limited life experience (and I don\u2019t mean that perjoratively. We ALL have limited experience compared to 2000 years of revelation and human experience). \u00a0After her parents\u2019 divorce there was no longer any authority besides herself she could trust; no single system to whom she could make herself vulnerable, besides herself. \u00a0She felt trapped by the spiritual home(earlier she states that she felt that the truth did not set her free but \u201ctrapped\u201d her) \u00a0that lied and said it could keep her safe, and so she left because it is safer to be spiritually homeless than to set yourself for that kind of hurt ever again.<\/p>\n Tiny House<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Of course, her parents\u2019 divorce did not\u00a0<\/i>result in a loss of faith. \u00a0Riley obviously had and has a very strong faith (defined by psychologists as the innate human drive to seek meaning, significance and transcendence) but unless she is willing to address the real trauma, the trauma of her parents\u2019 divorce resulting in an existential fear of spiritual commitment, she will be forced to perpetually deny herself any spiritual home that does not fit within the confines of her own experience\u2013and, in the grand scheme of human experience\u2013that is a tiny home indeed.<\/p>\n Family Life: Cause and Cure<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n The takeaway, as I have noted before<\/a>, \u00a0is that family life is the largely unappreciated crucible of spirituality. \u00a0We note in our book, Discovering God Together: The Catholic Guide to Raising Faithful Kids<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>all the literature says that if parents want their children to own their faith as adults, they have to experience their faith as the source of their warmth in their home. \u00a0If a faithful family lacks that warmth, then children will see faith as an empty shell that can\u2019t deliver what it promised. And if a faithful family breaks apart, children experience faith\u2013and the security it promises\u2013to be a terrible, hurtful lie that must be avoided at all costs.<\/p>\n