When people think about spiritual abuse, they usually imagine a bad leader hurting the people who follow them. But here’s something really important to know: leaders can also be victims of spiritual abuse.
This does not mean that leaders aren’t responsible for the ways they hurt other people. It doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be consequences for their actions. Part of healing as a leader who hurt others is all about recognising and taking responsibility for the harm that we caused.
It also doesn’t mean that you need stop being angry at a leader who has hurt you, or forgive them. Forgiveness can sometimes be a helpful part of healing for yourself, but it is never something that you owe someone else.
If you have been spiritually abused by a leader, no matter if they were a victim or not, you do not need to let them back into your life. You can keep healthy boundaries.
If you are a leader who has hurt others but is also a victim of spiritual abuse, this post can help you find enough courage and self-compassion to own the harm you caused, and understand why it happened.
How Leaders Can Be Victims: About Indoctrination
To understand how leaders can be victims, we need to talk about indoctrination. Indoctrination is when someone teaches you to believe something without letting you think for yourself.
For example:
- People might tell you, “This is the truth—don’t ask questions.”
- People might punish you for disagreeing.
- People might ask you to sing, chant, or pray in ways that turn off your logical thinking, so you accept things more easily.
These are all ways that people can control your beliefs and thinking, even when you don’t realise it.
To learn more about indoctrination, check out this post: What Is Indoctrination? How Spiritual Abuse Can Change How You Think.
How Harm Spreads
When a group uses these kinds of methods, the harm can spread like ripples in a pond. Usually, one powerful person starts the group. They teach harmful beliefs to the leaders under them. Those leaders then pass the same messages on to others. This is how leaders can also be victims of spiritual abuse.
The leaders may not know they’re causing harm. They might really believe they’re doing the right thing. After all, it happened to them first.
For example:
- A leader tells someone it’s wrong to be gay, not realising they’re repeating what was forced on them through conversion therapy.
- A leader tells people to confess everything in their lives, thinking it’s helping people grow, while really it’s a way of controlling them—because their own leader is doing the same to them.
- A leader pressures people to give up their job, family, or money for the group, believing that it is helping change the world for the better. They were pressured to do the same, and can’t see the damage it has caused in their own life.
So yes, leaders can be both victims and the ones causing harm.
Jumping Off the Drama Triangle
The Drama Triangle is a theory made by Stephen Karpman in the 1960s. It shows us three different roles we can assign to people when we are thinking about a situation:
- Victim – the person who gets hurt
- Persecutor – the person who causes harm
- Rescuer – the person trying to save the victim
When we are talking about abusive situations, we often put people into these roles. But if we trap ourselves in one of these roles, it becomes much harder to move forwards. These roles don’t tell the whole story.
- If we only see ourselves as a victim of spiritual abuse, we find it hard to admit the harm we caused.
- If we only see ourselves as a persecutor, we miss how we were harmed too, and the person who started the harm is never given their share of the blame.
- If we see other people as our rescuers, we will never learn to help ourselves.
We need to step off the triangle and tell a different story about what happened. Instead of getting stuck in those roles, we can start thinking in a more balanced way.
That means we can say:
- “Yes, I was hurt.”
- “Yes, I hurt others.”
- “Now, I want to understand what happened and do better.”
This can be hard when we are coming out of a controlling group. There often isn’t much space for us to think two different things are true at once – things are either true, or they are not. But that’s not how the real world works. This is another chance for us to let go of those either/or ways of thinking that we were trained to have when we were being spiritually abused.
How to Move Forwards: A Step-By-Step Guide
If you were a leader in a harmful group, and you now realise you caused harm while also being harmed, you might be asking: What do I do now?
Here’s the process that helped me:
Step 1: Recognise what happened to you
The first step is seeing that what happened to you was wrong. You were taught not to question things. You were made to feel ashamed of who you are. That’s not okay. Before we can move forwards, we need to learn about spiritual abuse and understand that even as leaders, we were abused and controlled.
To learn more, check out these posts:
- Spiritual Abuse Explained: What It Is and How to Recognise It
- What Is Indoctrination? How Spiritual Abuse Can Change How You Think
Step 2: Learn self-compassion.
This needs to be the place we start from. Self-compassion will give us the strength to face up to what we have done without getting overwhelmed or becoming cruel towards ourselves.
To read more about finding self-compassion, check out this post: Self-Compassion for Spiritual Abuse Survivors: A Step-By-Step Guide
Step 3: Learn to hold your emotions.
This means that we are able to dip into an emotion a little bit, and then come back to a place of calm and balance. It helps us to not get triggered or overwhelmed.
To learn more about this, check out this post: How to Heal from Spiritual Abuse Without Feeling Overwhelmed: A Gentle Guide
Step 4: Look at the ways you hurt others.
From a calm place, start thinking honestly about how you hurt people. Write things down. Try and gently notice what emotions are coming up for you. If you feel you are getting overwhelmed, do some grounding exercises and go and do something else. You can also visit the Help for When You Feel Overwhelmed: Getting Through Hard Moments page.
Step 5: Come back to self-compassion.
Look at the ways that you were manipulated to behave in this way. For each of the ways you caused harm, ask yourself: What beliefs was I taught that made this seem right at the time? Write them down. Notice what emotions this brings up for you.
Step 6: Decide how you want to process the emotions.
- If you feel anger at the people who hurt you, you could spend some time breathing deeply and feeling the anger move through your body, or shake it out. Dancing and exercise are also great ways to help anger move through.
- If you feel sadness for the ways you hurt other people, you could allow yourself to cry, and perhaps turn that sadness into something creative like doodling or painting.
- If you feel overwhelmed by shame, this calls for some self-compassion. Maybe you feel like you are a little child in a corner waiting for someone to come and tell you off. Try and picture your grown-up self coming and holding this young part of you, and telling it that they are safe and loved.
- Perhaps you feel angry at yourself, like a hot rage which is hard to hold inside. You can help this anger move through by doing something active. It is ok to feel angry at ourselves for a while, but it needs to be balanced with self-compassion, otherwise we will end up feeling powerless and stuck in self-hatred. It won’t help us move forwards.
Step 7: Come back to the present.
It is very important that we don’t get stuck in the past. We need to dip in and out and remind ourselves that our present is different. Don’t spend too long on deep emotional work in one go, and do something ‘normal’ afterwards.
For example, I often go for a walk around the block, do some cleaning or do something sociable afterwards.
Taking Action
Once you’ve done some healing, you might ask: Should I do something about what happened?
There are a few paths you can choose:
- Speak up: You might decide to report the organisation or the leader to help stop future harm. But this is tough, and it’s okay to wait or not do it at all. You need support around you if you choose this.
- Do something good: You might put your energy into making a difference, helping others, or just becoming the healthiest version of yourself.
- Learn to think for yourself: We can grow our critical thinking and self-awareness, and make sure we can not be pressured to cause harm again.
Whatever you choose, you are not powerless. You can move forward.
About Saying Sorry
When we realise we’ve hurt others, we might feel the need to say sorry. That’s natural. But it’s important to stop and think first.
Here are some questions to ask yourself before apologising:
How serious was the harm?
If you badly hurt someone or broke the law, it might not be okay to contact the person.
Are you apologising because you feel guilty, or because you want to help the other person?
Sometimes we are used to an unhealthy culture where we always have to say sorry for everything. We can act to protect ourselves from being punished, rather than because we care for the other person. They might not want to hear from you, and it might bring up unhelpful feelings from them.
Is this apology coming from a calm, adult part of you?
Or does it feel like a scared child begging not to be punished? If it is the scared child, then you can help them to feel safe yourself. That’s not a job for the person you hurt.
Are you hoping the other person will forgive you?
They might not, and that’s okay. Are you okay with that?
Do you want to repair the relationship?
Everyone has to be ready for that to happen. The other person probably had less power than you before, so it might be more healing and feel safer for them if they made the first move.
Can you handle how they might react?
They might be very angry, and feel like its ok to be hard on you. You need to know how much of this you want to take. Letting them use you as a punching bag to make yourself feel less guilty isn’t healthy.
It can be helpful to talk to a person you trust about this and get their advice. They might be able to see things more clearly from the outside.
Sometimes, it’s not helpful to apologise directly, especially if it might make things harder for the other person.
But you can still write a letter and don’t send it. You could burn the letter or tear it up as a way of saying, “I take responsibility. I am moving forward.”
Some Final Thoughts
- This work takes time. It might feel like peeling an onion—layer after layer. It will probably take months or years. Knowing that at the beginning can help you be kind to yourself when you feel like it’s taking longer than it should.
- It can be hard to accept both truths: that you were hurt and that you hurt others. As you learn more about how indoctrination works and heal more from the abuse, this will become easier.
- Use things from your life now to make it easier to come back to the present. I have a painting and some climbing gear that remind me I’m safe now, which I have with me whenever I’m doing emotional work. When I start to feel overwhelmed, I look at the painting and listen to the clinking of the climbing gear, and it reminds my brain and body that I survived the past.
- You don’t have to do this alone. It can be hard to find people who are able to understand how leaders can also be victims of spiritual abuse. If you can, talk to a therapist or someone who understands these kinds of experiences. Visit the Get Help for Spiritual Abuse page for some ideas of where to start.
You Are Not Alone
If you’ve been a leader who caused harm because you were a victim of spiritual abuse, you’re not the only one. You were taught not to think for yourself. Now, you’re learning how to take back control of your life, understand your past, and choose a better future.
Healing is hard. It takes courage. But step by step, it’s possible.
Some other posts you might like:
- How to Heal from Spiritual Abuse: A Step-by-Step Recovery Guide
- How to Heal From Indoctrination: Taking Back Your Mind
- Does Spiritual Abuse Cause Trauma? Understanding the Impact
Books I Used to Write This Post
- Anchored: How to Befriend Your Nervous System Using Polyvagal Theory, by Deb Dana.
- Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma, by Janina Fisher
- Escaping the Maze of Spiritual Abuse, by Lisa Oakley and Justin Humphreys
- Take Back Your Life: Recovering From Cults and Abusive Relationships, by Janja Lalich and Madeleine Tobias
- Walking Free From The Trauma Of Coercive, Cultic and Spiritual Abuse, by Gillie Jenkinson
For more helpful books, videos and podcasts about spiritual abuse and the road to recovery, check out the Spiritual Abuse Recovery: Helpful Resources page.
