Thursday, January 24, 2008

An open ended question:

What is spiritual abuse?

5 comments:

Joe said...

Spiritual abuse is when someone uses spiritual language to diminish, belittle and ignore others leading to emotional, mental and physical abuse.

Megs said...

using God's name to make people do what you want them to.

byron smith said...

Great question.

Here's my stab: to treat God (and so others) as though he were your idol to manipulate.

Anonymous said...

Using a personal religous belief to manipulate and control other people thru fear

Anonymous said...

Looking at these answers I'd say spiritual abuse is a specific type of emotional abuse, which uses religious ideas and imagery to acheive its aim (control or hurt someone vulnerable to you).
I remember going on an assemblies of god camp as a child and we were kept up really late on the last night to be preached to about damnation/salvation, with altat call. i'd say that's abusive because the people in power (adult caretakers) were using the altered state of hyper-arousal (happens to 8 year olds when you keep them up past 10pm) to obtain the outcome they wanted (lots of individuals praying the sinner's prayer and giving their lives to the lord). it's emotional manipulation in a religious setting, thus probably the sort of thing people mean when they talk about spiritual abuse.