Used to Be

A few weeks ago, a new client wrote to me before our first session. A friend had told her I "used to be a pastor's wife." She used those words carefully, like she wasn't quite sure the phrase still applied, like she was handing it to me to check. I sat with her email for a long moment before I answered. I wasn't sure either.

Twenty five years is a long time to be known by a title. It shapes how people find you, how they trust you, what they assume you'll understand without being told. That season of my life has ended now, and yet the title still travels ahead of me sometimes, still opens doors before I've walked through them myself. I've noticed I don't quite know what to do with that. It isn't false, but it isn't the whole truth either. It sits in an in between place, and I'm learning that in between places take longer to name than we'd like.

I often think about how much pressure there is to name things quickly. Deconstruction is the word that gets handed to people in my position, and I understand why. But I've started to resist it, gently, because it feels too tidy for what actually happens. It suggests something taken apart on purpose, piece by piece, with a plan for what comes next. What I've lived, and what so many of the women I sit with have lived, doesn't feel like that. It feels less like taking something apart and more like something inside quietly breaking, without anyone deciding it should.

This is where I've begun to lean on a different word: moral injury. Researchers describe moral injury as the lasting wound that comes from perpetrating, failing to prevent, witnessing, or learning about something that violates a person's deeply held moral beliefs. It was first named in the context of soldiers, but it has found its way into rooms like mine, into women who loved their faith and their church and gave decades to it, only to watch it fail to protect them or someone they loved. It isn't about losing belief. It's about the body and the mind trying to hold two true things at once: this mattered to me, and this hurt me.

Most of the women who find their way into my office now carry some version of this. Church harm, religious trauma, the particular ache of loving a system that didn't love them back the way it promised to. I recognize pieces of it. I try to step into this work carefully, because it isn't only theirs, and because I don't want to make my own story louder than it needs to be in a room that belongs to someone else. But I also don't think I can write honestly about this and pretend I'm only watching it from the outside.

I've started to notice why women trust me with this. The ones still standing in the pew trust me because I carried the title for so long, because I lived what that life actually costs and not just what it looks like from the outside. But there's another reason too. The women who never went to church, or who tried for years and could never make themselves fit, trust me for something different. I think it's because I have so much room in me now for questioning. I'm not asking anyone to arrive anywhere in particular. That kind of room seems to matter most to people who spent years being told exactly how much space they were allowed to take up.

Here is the part I want to be really clear about. This in between place, this questioning, does not mean you have to leave your faith. It might, for some people. It might not, for others. Nothing about it is required, and I think that might actually be the whole point. There's a room in the Harry Potter books called the Room of Requirement, it becomes whatever the person standing outside it needs it to be. I keep turning that name over. What if the work isn't finding the right room of requirement at all, but finding a room where requirement itself stops being the rule. A room where nothing is asked of you before you're allowed to be there.

Have you ever tried to explain a season of your life to someone and felt the words come out smaller than the actual experience? Have you carried a grief that doesn't have clean edges, that people keep asking you to summarize before you've even found the shape of it yourself?

Some of what I've noticed moral injury can look like, in myself and in the women I sit with:

•       A flinch at language or a song that used to feel like home

•       Loyalty to people or a place that also caused real harm

•       Guilt for questioning, and guilt for still believing

•       A body that tenses before the mind knows why

•       Grief for a version of yourself who trusted more easily

•       The exhausting work of explaining a "used to be" to people who want a clean answer

None of this needs to be resolved before it can be spoken. There is an invitation here, not to find the right word yet, but to let the unease be honest while it's still finding its shape. You are allowed to hold love and harm in the same hand. Nothing is required of you here either, not resolution, not an answer, not a direction. You are allowed to not know what to call this season yet, and still let it be real.

Sources

Moral Injury & Religious Trauma, The Garden Refuge: gardenrefugeil.org

Moral trauma, moral distress, moral injury, and moral injury disorder: definitions and assessments, Frontiers in Psychology: frontiersin.org