Brenda Palmer, a former television producer who now preaches and writes, was serving on a church staff when she learned that her boyfriend was in an inappropriate relationship with her pastor, a man she called her spiritual father. Years later, she told Lisa Fields, founder and host of Jude 3 Project, that pieces of that wound still surfaced unexpectedly. She described those moments in one plain phrase: “dang, this is connected to that.” Healing after a spiritual leader wounds you rarely follows a schedule. It moves slowly and returns to old places. What follows is a set of practices for that slow work: lamenting honestly before God, choosing the right person to tell, and letting healing take the time it actually takes.
You can work through these practices alone over two or three weeks, one section at a time, with a pen and paper nearby. You can also use them with one or two people you already trust. Nobody needs to name the leader who hurt them, and nobody reads aloud anything they wrote unless they want to. If you are leading a small group, say that out loud before you begin, and then keep to it. When you ask a question, let the quiet last. Silence is not failure. It may be the first time someone has been given room to think about what happened.
Mark where you are starting
Before you open the Bible, write down three things on one page. Keep them short. Nobody else needs to see them.
- How long you think you should take to be over this.
- Who you have told so far, and how each of those conversations went.
- What you have said to God about it, if anything, in your own words.
Fold the page and put it somewhere you will find it again. You will come back to it at the end. The goal is not to grade yourself. You are recording your current assumptions so you can see later whether any of them have changed.
Palmer’s starting point was silence. She said, “I didn’t even know who to tell or who to talk to,” and so “I internalized a lot of it.” If your page shows that you have told no one and said nothing to God, that is not a moral failure. It shows you where you are standing.
Read Psalm 55 with a pencil
Psalm 55 is a lament, a prayer of complaint written as Hebrew poetry. It does not argue for a doctrine. It gives words to someone in pain, and it keeps those words in Scripture. Read the whole psalm slowly, out loud if you can. Then go back to Psalm 55:12-14:
For it was not an enemy that reproached me; then I could have borne it: neither was it he that hated me that did magnify himself against me; then I would have hid myself from him: But it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance. We took sweet counsel together, and walked unto the house of God in company.
“Acquaintance” here means someone close and familiar, a companion rather than a passing contact. With a pencil, mark the following in your Bible or on a printed copy:
- Every word David uses for the person who hurt him. Notice that “guide” is among them.
- The place where David wants to escape. Psalm 55:6 says, “And I said, Oh that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away, and be at rest.”
- How often he prays. Psalm 55:17 says, “Evening, and morning, and at noon, will I pray, and cry aloud: and he shall hear my voice.”
- The last words of the psalm, in Psalm 55:23: “but I will trust in thee.”
Look at what you marked. David returns to the betrayal more than once. He wants to run. He prays morning, noon and night, which suggests that one prayer was not enough. The psalm ends with trust, but the betrayer has not repented and the situation is not repaired. The trust stands next to the pain. It does not replace it.
Be honest about the harder lines too. In verse 15 and again in verse 23, David asks God to bring his betrayers down. A lament records what a wounded person actually prays. It does not instruct you to wish death on anyone. What the psalm does model is where David takes that anger: he brings it to God rather than acting on it himself. Psalm 55:22 points the same way: “Cast thy burden upon the LORD, and he shall sustain thee.”
Discussion question. Which part of Psalm 55 sounds most like what you would actually say, and which part feels too far from where you are? Neither answer is wrong.
Write your own lament
Now borrow the psalm’s movement and write a lament of your own. Give yourself twenty minutes. The prayer does not need to be polished or fair to anyone. Use these five prompts in order, and write a few lines for each:
- Address God directly. Use whatever name for God you can honestly say right now.
- Name the person by their role, not their name. Pastor, mentor, worship leader, spiritual father. Then write what they were to you, the way David writes “my guide.”
- Write down what it cost you, specifically. A specific loss carries more weight than a general one. “Church hurt” is a category. The friendships that ended, the Sunday you stopped singing, the house you once had a key to: those are the actual losses.
- Write where you want to fly away to. David wanted wings. What escape have you imagined?
- Write one sentence of trust, even an unfinished one. It can be as small as David’s words in Psalm 55:23, “but I will trust in thee.” It can also be a complaint addressed to God, which is still a way of trusting that God is listening.
On that last prompt, Palmer’s honesty may help. After she moved and started over with almost nothing, she said, “I had to be honest with God and say, Hey, I feel like you kinda left me out here.” She said that to God, not about God. Telling God he seems absent is how many psalms begin.
If you are in a group, do not ask anyone to read their lament aloud. Ask only one thing: was writing it harder or easier than you expected? Let people answer with a single word or pass entirely.
Discussion question. Which of the five prompts was hardest to write, and what do you think makes it hard?
Test the person before you tell them
A lament is spoken to God. Healing usually also requires telling another person. The question is who. Palmer described the person she wishes she had found. She would have processed it, she said, “with a person who was outside of it, mature, that could handle it, that could tell me the next steps to take because I didn’t know.”
That sentence works as a test. On a fresh page, write the names of three people you might tell. Then ask four questions about each one:
- Are they outside of it? Do they have anything to protect, such as the church, the leader, or their own standing? Palmer’s church had elders, but both her parents and her pastor’s parents sat on the board.
- Are they mature? Can they hear something ugly without panicking or turning it into a cause?
- Can they handle it? Or will you end up caring for them? As more people learned what happened, Palmer said, “I felt like I was pastoring them through it.”
- Can they help with next steps? Will they help you think through what comes next, or only react?
It is all right if no name passes all four questions. That tells you something useful. Your next step may be finding that person: a counselor, an older believer in a different congregation, or a pastor with no connection to your former church. Seeking therapy is not a failure of faith. God works through trained counselors, and many people find that a counselor is the best first person to tell.
Notice what is missing from the list: a large audience. Lisa Fields puts it simply: “you need to go to somebody but you don’t have to go to the internet.” Palmer adds a sentence some readers may need to hear: “And you don’t owe the world an explanation for what you’re navigating.” If you ever do share more widely, she suggests first asking yourself, “what’s the motive behind why I’m sharing?” She waited about two years before telling her story, starting in a small group, because for a long time she could not talk about it without reliving it.
One limit applies to everything above. If what the leader did was abuse or a crime, the person you tell should include someone with the power to act, such as law enforcement or an attorney. If the harm happened in your home or involves a partner, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233. If you report a crime to the right people, you are telling the truth. You are not betraying your church.
Discussion question. Which of the four tests do you think people most often skip when they choose whom to tell, and why?
Keep a slow record of what still hurts
Now go back to your folded first page and reread your answer to the first item, how long you thought healing should take. Hold it next to Palmer’s account. She said the thing she struggled with most was “not getting over it fast as I wanted to.” When something set her off, her reaction was, “I can’t believe this is still bothering me.” What helped was not a deadline: “I had to learn to give myself grace and enter the process and watch the Lord unfold it.”
Her therapist also asked a question that changed her expectations: “What is the expectation here? This ain’t going back to normal.” Healing did not mean recovering the old life. It meant grieving it. Fields describes the goal another way: “healing is like getting you back to yourself.”
For the next month, keep a slow record. It is a single page with three columns, and it takes two minutes on the days you need it:
- What set it off. A song, a building, a name in a group chat, a sermon phrase.
- What it connected to. Your own version of what Brenda Palmer called “this is connected to that.”
- What you did with it. Prayed one line of Psalm 55, called your one person, went for a walk, or nothing at all.
The record is not proof that you are failing to heal. Over weeks, it shows you a pattern. Some triggers fade. Some turn out to be tied to beliefs you absorbed in that church that need to be reread with Scripture open. Some may point to a habit of guarding yourself, like the one Palmer found in herself years later: “I never settle in a place because I’m always waiting for it to fall apart.” Seeing that pattern in writing gives you something concrete to bring to your trusted person or counselor.
Discussion question. What do you think changes when a person stops treating a trigger as evidence of failure?
Discussion question. Palmer chose to move “all in” with a new church while knowing she could be hurt again. What would need to be true for that risk to be wise rather than reckless?
Carry one practice for the next month
Pick one of these practices. Do not try all three. Healing at its own pace includes not taking on too much at once.
- Pray the psalm’s rhythm. Morning, noon and evening, as in Psalm 55:17, pray one honest sentence to God about what happened. It can be the same sentence every day.
- Ask for one conversation. Contact the person who best passed the four tests. Ask for an hour. You do not need a prepared speech. You can say that you have been carrying something and need to say it out loud to someone who can hold it.
- Keep the record. Fill in the three columns whenever something stirs. At the end of the month, read the page from top to bottom once.
Some people, much later, find themselves ready for the prayer Palmer eventually prayed about the person who hurt her: “okay God, I need your perspective of this person, because I won’t be able to let this go until I see them the way that you do.” Treat that prayer as a possibility for later, not as an assignment. It is not a requirement for this month, and it says nothing about restoring a relationship with someone who is unsafe.
When the month ends, unfold the page you wrote at the start. Read your three answers again. Then write one new sentence underneath them, in response to the question you started with: knowing what you know now, how long do you think this healing should take, and who gets to decide?
Go deeper in the Jude 3 library
- How Do You Heal From Church Hurt (Article)
- How Do You Heal From Church Hurt (Study guide)
- How Do You Recognize and Heal From Spiritual Manipulation by Church Leaders (Article)
- How Do You Recognize and Heal From Spiritual Manipulation by Church Leaders (Study guide)
This study guide draws on a Jude 3 Project conversation with Lisa Fields and Brenda Palmer. Hear it in full on the Watch page.