When a Circle or Ceremony does harm: Disappointing, Damaging, or Spiritual Abuse?

My TMJ pain in my jaw flared up the night before I published this.
Face, neck, heart space.

It was the part of me that learned at age five that telling the truth was dangerous. I sat with her for a while and showed her where I am now and that I am safe, and the pain moved through me.

Then I pressed publish

There is no regulator for a women's circle.

No complaints procedure for a ceremony, no safeguarding lead at a retreat.

This is a personal essay on religious control, spiritual abuse, and how to tell the difference between a space that disappointed you and a space that harmed you.

It's just an apple

I was five, and I had been at the new school a week.

We had moved across the country that November. Dad had been shot in the September by the IRA, though nobody said it out loud. There was a version being told, something about a car accident, but I knew the truth.

Thursday assembly. Mr Spencer, the Presbyterian minister, standing at the front with a red apple held up in one hand.

“Look at this beautiful apple, children. So shiny. Wouldn't you want to take a bite?”

The other children nodded. They always nodded. I never understood how they did it so easily and I assumed for a long time that they knew something I did not.

“But what if I told you it was black inside? Rotten and horrible. Would you still want it?”

He was looking straight at me by then. “People can be like this apple, he said. Lovely on the outside, dark and wicked within.” And then the smile adults use when they need a child to be helpful. “Now, I need a volunteer. How about our new girl?”

I walked up on wobbly legs My heart was beating so hard I thought everyone must hear it. I wanted to be somewhere else entirely.

He had bruised the apple beforehand, banging it about to make his point, and he handed it to me the way you hand someone the proof of your argument. “You wouldn’t eat this knowing it is black inside?”

I bit into it. Hard. I surprised myself.

The flesh was brown and soft and bitter, exactly as rotten as he had promised. I kept chewing anyway, with the whole hall silent and his mouth open, and then I swallowed it and looked at him.

“It's just an apple,” I said.

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I was terrified. But there was something within me that would not go along with it. I felt this at Sunday school and scripture exams. Girls Brigade and youth fellowship and every church hall where a man described hell like he had been there himself and sadistically enjoyed the telling.

I did not feel brave.
I felt like the odd ball, in a place where being the odd ball was not safe.

How the one who asks becomes the one on trial

What that upbringing taught me was not that religion is bad. Plenty of people I love found something real in it.

The Presbyterianism I experienced showed me how it feels to be on trial.

Daily.

There was always somebody weighing you up, and something about you being decided. Your name. Your school. Whether you had learned your Catechism. You grew up understanding that you were constantly being judged for thinking for yourself. For being curious. For challenging hypocrisy I could so easily see in the powers that be.

I was ten and I brought two science books to Sunday school. We had been told humans did not come from apes and I wanted to check, so I took them in one Sunday.

My Sunday School teacher held one up so the room could see it.

“These are lies,” she said. And she said it to everyone in the room. Then in front of everyone she told me I was wrong, and that bringing them in was a very bad thing to have done.

No discussion. No, that is an interesting question, Ruth. No, let us look at what the book says. Wrong, and bad, and everybody watching.

I went home that Sunday morning feeling deep in my belly that I had done something shameful, yet not being able to say what.

You do not get an answer. You get a verdict. The question goes in and comes back out as a charge against you.

There was nothing left for me to say. Object and you are difficult. Ask again and you are obsessed. Go quiet and you are resistant.

Nobody had to explain any of that to me. I was ten and I already knew not to ask a second time.

Eve or Mary: the two roles women are offered

It took me most of my twenties to really understand what the minister had put in my hand that day.

Eve did not eat the apple out of weakness. She did not eat it because a snake talked her round or because women are easily influenced. She ate it because she was hungry. Hungry for knowledge itself, for the taste of knowing a thing for herself instead of being told.

That is the sin. Curiosity.

They built the whole architecture of women on that one bite, and by the time it reached a Sunday school in 1980s Northern Ireland there were two roles girls and women could have.

Eve, who was salacious and ruined it for everyone. Or Mary, who said yes and put her needs last.

And it was never only about questions. Everywhere we went the message was the same. Sex was bad. You are a bad girl if you have sex. Nobody ever said there might be such a thing as ordinary healthy desire. A woman telling a room of girls that if one of us got into trouble, we all knew whose fault that would be. That was the sex education I got.

Be the one who wants, and be the reason for the fall. Or be the good one, the obedient one, the one who said yes to somebody else's plan, and be “rewarded” for it.

Years later I was at university reading medieval literature and I found Marie de France, writing in the twelfth century, and it stopped me in my tracks.

Women who took lovers. Women who walked out of loveless marriages. Women who were not ashamed of their own bodies, written with activism, by a woman, eight hundred years ago.

Reading her felt like reading about Northern Ireland.

The same fear of what a woman might desire. The same two options of Mary or Eve. Marie was arguing against it in the twelfth century yet it was still choking the life out of girls in Derry in 1986.

That is why I work with the Morrighan, Brigid, Áine and the other Celtic goddesses now. The Morrighan does not apologise for her power. Brigid does not ask permission to create. Áine defends her own body as sacred territory. Fierce and tender. Wild and wise. Creative and destructive. Mothering, sexual and sovereign.

I left Northern Ireland and the religious abuse I experienced at 19 and did not look back for a long time.

So I would like to tell you how surprised I was, nearly thirty years later, sitting on the floor of a village hall with a drum in my lap, to be handed the option of Mary. Soften. Surrender. Come back to love. Do what you’re told.

Be a good girl. Don’t question. Don’t have a low vibration. Only love and light here.

When ceremony does harm in spiritual spaces

The whole morning had been theory. Instruction from the front of the room. Being told about grief instead of being helped to meet it in the body.

A room full of people with cancer, chronic pain, fatigue, MS, sitting still on chairs for three hours while somebody explained grief to them.

By early afternoon I could not breathe in there.

So I volunteered to go outside and gather leaves for one of the altars.

On my way out a facilitator stopped me.

“Do you ask permission before you take?”

The tone had already decided the answer. She had looked at me and seen someone who needed teaching, before I had said a word, before she knew anything at all about me or my own shamanic practice.

I said, “yes, of course.”

She asked if I left a tangible offering. Suggested my hair.

An English woman, instructing an Irish woman in how to relate to the land.

I did not argue. I went outside and did it the way I have always done it. Voice, prayer, intention. An offering that comes from inside myself.

I found a sycamore at the edge of the field and stood under it in the pouring rain looking out over a meadow of wildflowers, just breathing.

That was the most genuinely held I felt all day.

At a grief ritual. Alone. Outside. Avoiding it. For as long as I could. A good 20 minutes.

Our bodies often know before we get to the car to go home. But often we do not get to keep that knowing, because the room takes it off us and hands us something else instead. That we were triggered and instead needed to regulate. That something got activated and it is our fault. That accepting the resistance is where the medicine is. That this is our work to do.

So we travel home carrying their version alongside shame in our bodies instead of our own lived experiences, and by the time we arrive home we are already doubting our own realities.

When a Circle is just disappointing

I once went to a dark moon ritual.

During this time there can be a desire to turn inward. I see the dark moon as a compost heap. She is not interested in what you are growing. She wants to know what you are willing to let rot down into the dark until it is soil.

We made little wreaths.

Foliage. A length of ribbon. I sat in a village hall with my greenery in my lap waiting for a tiered stand to appear, cucumber sandwiches with the crusts off, and creamed scones.

Dainty. Delicate. Terribly, terribly nice.

I had come for the dark; for the depth; and I was given a craft table.

And that is all it was. Superficial. Disappointing. A waste of a Saturday and energy I did not have to spare.

Most of what goes wrong in these spaces is exactly this. Someone out of their depth, running a day they have not thought hard enough about, promising a depth they have never been to themselves.

When a circle causes harm without meaning to

Thirty minutes before a Circle I was attending, I learned from the facilitator that there was a song about mothers and sisters and daughters we were going to sing. I immediately told her that I could not sing it. I briefly explained the wounding. I said I would step outside when it came and asked her to let me know when it was coming.

I was crying on the walk there. That is how much my body knew before I got to the space yet I overrode my body and believed that I would be safe here, held with the other women, especially because of the nature of the wounding that had come up.

How wrong was I.

She sang it anyway without warning, and she chose a version that went further in.

I had no way out.

I had named the wound in writing, in advance, in plain language, to the woman holding the space. There was nothing else I could have done.

And it made no difference at all.

When the song started, my heart began to break open before quickly swallowing the grief. I left my body as I couldn’t feel what needed to be felt in a space where I felt totally unsafe.

So I I disassociated.

This is what happens when I cannot fight and I cannot run.

When it becomes spiritual abuse

I was on my knees at an altar in the middle of my own grief. Doing precisely what I had come there to do. Expressing grief, in my own way, at my own volume.

A facilitator stood over me and told me I was holding back.

“You are a large lady. The sound can match your size.”

Then the woman assigned to witness me came closer and touched my back. “Get that fibromyalgia out of your body. You don't need it. Get it out. Come on. Scream! You can make the noise.”

Then the facilitator again, urgent. “You have an amazing opportunity here. You are wasting it.”

And then, at a grief altar, to a woman already crying: “fake it till you make it.”

Nobody raised their voices. Every one of those sentences was delivered calmly, with a hand hovering somewhere near my shoulder, by women who would tell you they were helping. 

I was grieving. I was doing the exact thing the day was built for.

And I was told my grief was the wrong size, the wrong volume and the wrong shape. I was told my chronic pain was an inconvenience I should be able to easily put down.

I was told to perform the feeling I was already having, because the way I was expressing it was not the ‘right way’.

The Church of England, who have had to learn this the hard way and now have some of the clearest language on it, define spiritual abuse as a form of emotional and psychological abuse, marked by a systematic pattern of coercive and controlling behaviour inside a religious context. Coercion. Control. Not raised voices. You can do the whole thing in a soft voice with your head tilted.

There was nobody to tell.

If this happened to you at work there is a grievance procedure. At your GP surgery there is a complaints process pinned to the wall. Your child's school has a safeguarding lead with a name and a photograph. 

A women's circle has none of that. A ceremony has none of that. A weekend retreat you paid six hundred pounds for has none of that.

There is the facilitator who ran it. That is it.

So you understandably say nothing. And they rarely find out. And they run it again next month.

What separates a disappointing day from an abusive one

Not intention most of the time. Most of these facilitators believed they were doing good work.

But trauma informed is a weekend now. Two days, and you get a certificate.

A space holder cannot take you where they have not been. If you go down further than they have ever gone, they may become frightened, because they do not know what they are looking at, and they will pull you back up to where they feel comfortable.

And then they will tell you they were keeping you safe.

Managing their own fear. And I have swallowed this so many times just to keep them comfortable, which is a thing most of us learned to do.

I can’t and will not do this anymore. I speak up.

Scripts, catechisms and spiritual rules nobody can explain

Another ceremony, another turn of the wheel, and we were handed a sheet of paper.

We had to read it out loud. All together.

I do not remember one word of it. What I remember is leaving my body while I said it. Floating up near the ceiling of a community centre, listening to myself recite a page I did not mean, and realising I was back in Sunday school.

Sitting in rows saying words in unison because that is what you do here.

I have been to a lot of these now and there is nearly always a page. A declaration. An invocation. A line everybody says together. Nobody asks whether it is true for you, because that is not what it is for.

Then there was the ceremony where I was booked to provide the sound.

They wanted a sound journey, and then they told me how to do it. Walk around the space three times. Then this bit, nine times. Then over here. Then that.

Choreography…

At another ritual, I was told I was not permitted to go into an altered state.

I had a drum in my hands at the time.

The drum is for crossing. In some traditions they call it the shaman's horse, because it carries you over. And the drummer has to cross too. You cannot hold a threshold from outside it. A drummer who stays controlled and correct and above it all is not a ritual drummer, she is a metronome, and a metronome takes nobody anywhere.

I know exactly where I recognise all of this from.

Saturday nights at the kitchen table, learning my catechism. Questions and answers to be given back word perfect the next morning. Nobody explained a line of it. Nobody asked whether I believed any of it. You said it right or there was trouble.

That is what a catechism is.

And this spiritual world is stuffed with them. This is how you drum to meet spirit. This is how you play the rattle. This is which way round the circle goes. This is how you cast, how you open, how you close, how you make an offering, how you say goodbye. This is the correct way to greet a tree.

Rules everywhere, handed out by people who did not make them either, and cannot tell you where they came from, and would rather you did not ask.

Anger is not the problem

Nearly every time I have named something in these spiritual spaces that was not working, I have been told the same thing in different ways.

“I could really feel your anger.”

Not: tell me more, I want to understand how that happened. Not: I broke your boundary and I am sorry.

I have been told I am too sensitive. That my ego needs to dissolve. That my boundaries are just my trauma talking. I was handed The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle and told my pain was a pain body, and that if I could rise above it my body would settle. That my pain was my fault.

I was in agony at the time.

Somebody broke my boundary and my anger came up, the way it is supposed to. That is what anger is for. It arrives to tell you this is wrong, something needs to change here. It was a message and it was accurate.

But it was not met with curiosity. Nobody asked what had happened, or what they had done, or what I needed. Instead, my response became the subject, and what they had done stopped being the subject.

This is defensive. To stay with what I said, they would have had to look at what they did.

So they reach for the language to turn my response to their actions back on me. That I am too much. Too opinionated. My anger, my sensitivity, my ego, my trauma, my pain body.

Anything at all, as long as it is not them.

I know this machine. I was raised in it. In Sunday school and church my curiosity was the bad thing I had done. Here my anger is low vibration, unhealed, not yet transcended.

Softer words. Same machine. Same output.
You are the problem.

A community that treats anger as a symptom can no longer be told anything, because every criticism arrives pre-labelled as the critic's own unfinished work.

Why menopausal rage gets called low vibration

Think about who is often in these rooms when this happens.

Women in midlife. Good girls for forty years. Pleasant, accommodating, easy to be around, who put themselves last so consistently they lost track of where they had put themselves.

Then the oestrogen drops and the mask comes off and for the first time in our lives we can feel the anger that was never allowed to be felt. About what was taken. About what we gave away. About every time we said yes when our whole bodies were screaming no.

So we bring it to a women's circle.

And we are told we are low vibration. That it is our shadow. That we needs to soften, to surrender, to come back to love.

Told to be a good girl. Again. In a room full of women. By another woman.

In 1984 the psychologist John Welwood called this spiritual bypassing. Using spiritual ideas to step around what has not been dealt with.

A saviour is avoiding their own healing

I told a holistic practitioner I worked alongside what I needed around my pain. I was specific. I said it more than once. I said it more than twice.

She did the opposite.

Then she started asking me if I was all right. In front of a circle I was serving. Twice in the same evening, in that soft voice, with her head on one side.

I said I am in pain but I am able to hold space. In fact, my life experience of chronic pain often makes me better at holding space.

And then she told me my own lived experience back to me. “Ah, but it is not like that all the time. Sometimes it is better than others.”

Standing there, being told what my own body does by a practitioner who does not live in it.

That is pity, and pity is not care.
Care asks. Pity decides.

She had made herself the well one and me the sick one, in public, at a Circle I was holding.

So I named it. The boundary, broken more than once, and what I needed instead.

And then I was the problem and she was the one who was hurt.

Rescuer, persecutor, victim, in the space of a few moments. Karpman drew that drama triangle in 1968 and once you have seen it you cannot unsee it. What he said about rescuers is the part that stayed with me: the helping is the avoidance.

To someone standing in that triangle, being asked to look at what they did feels like an attack. So accountability sounds like blame. Naming sounds like shaming.

And the boundary you asked for is never spoken of again. Instead, you are made the villain.

The room that told the truth

I was working alongside another practitioner and we were planning how to open the space.

They wanted everyone to go round and say their name and that they were present.

“Hello, I'm Ruth, and I am present.”

I said no.

Because you are asking people to declare a state they might not be in. Some of them will have come straight from work, or from a row in the car, or from a night with no sleep. Some will be stressed. And you are handing them an emotional state to declare that they may not be feeling and asking them to say it out loud in front of strangers.

They will say it because everyone else is saying it, and in that moment you have taught the room that this is a place where you perform the right answer.

The practitioner agreed with me.

Then on the day they did it anyway.

Round the circle it went. Hello, I'm so and so, and I am present. Hello, I'm so and so, and I am present.

Third woman.

“Actually, I am not present at all. I feel really anxious. I do not feel like I am in my body.”

And the room changed. I felt it go.

Because the next woman said something similar. And so did the one after her. And the one after that. Every single woman, in her own words, said where she actually was, and none of them were present, and by the time it came round nobody was reaching for that line any more.

They were telling their truths.

That was the best opening circle I have ever been part of.

And it’s because one woman would not say a sentence that was not true, and the moment she did not, everybody else stopped too.

What religious abuse has taught me about what’s wrong with modern spirituality

I grew up in Northern Ireland in the 1980s. I have already shared with you what that was like.

What it left me with is not just an ear, but a whole body that reads a room before I do.

The chest closing. The tracking. The part of me that is already working out where the door is while I am still smiling at somebody. I first experienced it at five and and for most of my childhood I thought it was a fault.

It was not my fault.

The leaders had the answers. God had told them, there was no arguing with it, and a child who asked a question was the problem.

Thirty years later I sit in rooms with people who know. Who have the answers. Who have been told by spirit, or by their teacher, or by the tradition, and there is no arguing with that either, and someone who asks a question is resistant.

I grew up in religious spaces where a child was not allowed to ask. For a lot of my adult life I have been creating experiences where a woman can.

I bit an apple when I was five because a presbyterian minister told me it was rotten inside. I did it because now I know I was feeling coerced and even at five years old, I wasn’t having that.

Why women often doubt what happened to them

If you have read this far, I would guess you have your own version.

And perhaps you have talked yourself out of what really happened to you.

“Everyone else had a wonderful day.”

And underneath that, the one that does the real damage: I sat there. I said nothing. I went back the next month.

Of course you did. It was your community. Your friends, your Saturdays, the only place you had found in years. Saying anything meant losing all of it on top of whatever had already happened. Staying is not evidence that nothing happened. It is evidence that it cost too much to leave.

So let me say the thing nobody said to me.

Your question was fair. Your grief was the right size. Your anger was accurate.
And whatever your body felt, before your mind started convincing you otherwise, that was yours and it was right.

If you know a woman who you think may need to hear this, please share this.

Many of us women only work out what happened to us when we hear another woman say it first.

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