S5:E1 - Spiritual Abuse Awareness Month: You Are Not Broken - with Brian Lee
2024/01/10
Brian Lee shares his personal story of experiencing spiritual abuse and what led him to start Broken to Beloved, an online summit and support resource for survivors.
Register for the Broken to Beloved Summit January 23-26, 2024 HERE
Brian Lee is a pastor, coach, and speaker. As a survivor of spiritual abuse and religious trauma, he has spent his time since leaving vocational ministry in 2021 working to provide recovery and resources for fellow victims and survivors. In 2023, he created and founded Broken to Beloved, a nonprofit organization that exists to help other victims and survivors through its Annual Summit and seasonal Cohorts, while also providing trauma awareness and safeguarding practices to pastors, leaders and churches.
Based in Richmond, VA, Brian loves to go on outdoor adventures with his family, explore their neighborhood, community, and city, find good parks, enjoy good food, and have fun together. As a coffee snob and addict, he could always use another cup.
Transcript (Transcript is unedited for typos or misspellings):
Katherine: hey, Brian.
Brian: Hey, Katherine. How's it going? Going? All right. How about you? Doing,
Katherine: doing well, doing, doing okay for doing okay. Or a Tuesday.
Brian: It's just for the end of the month slash year slash the world is losing its mind.
Katherine: Right. I know like there's been a lot of moments this week where somebody will say something about Christmas and I'm like, Oh, that's, that's on Sunday.
Yes. Okay. We are, we are still, there is still Christmas. Yes. Well, thanks for joining me. I am really excited to talk to you about your summit that you are hosting and curating in January for Spiritual Abuse Awareness Month. At the time this episode comes out, it will already be January. So I'm really excited to hear about that.
I got to participate in that [00:01:00] last year. We'll be participating again this year. Great time to just connect with other people working in this spiritual abuse, recovery, religious trauma, recovery space, and also. Spiritual Abuse Awareness Month for folks who are not aware is in January. And we were talking before we started recording about when we first heard about Spiritual Abuse Awareness Month.
When, when was it for listeners that you first
Brian: heard about it? I just learned about it last year because, and I, but to be fair, I've only been doing this work for about a year now. I wish I knew about it sooner. And I think we were both saying it's like, we can't find who originated this thing. But it's been around for at least 20 years, which to me is crazy.
Yeah. I learned about it because of Aaron hung, who's an artist who was doing that whole AZ trauma recovery series on her Instagram page. And I was like, spiritually, it'd be some awareness a month. That's a thing. And then the more I dove into it, I was like, Oh my gosh, this is absolutely a thing. And it's been around a long time.
Why do we not know more about it?
Katherine: Exactly. I was wondering too, when, [00:02:00] when did that book, the oldest probably. Documented writing about spiritual abuse is probably the subtle power of spiritual abuse. I
Brian: think that's what I was thinking. Yep. And that was, I think it was written in the 90s. I want to say, okay, I'm going to look for a publication date because I want to be sure.
But I remember reading it thinking I was like, did they just write this like a year ago? And it's like, no, it's been around for a very long time. Yeah,
Katherine: yeah, yeah. And then even just like the reality that PTSD. Was not an official diagnosis until the 80s.
Brian: Yes.
Katherine: Yes. We're very new in this trauma world. Yes.
We're all very new to this. This is a new, new territory for all of us. Did you, did you find the
Brian: date? Amazon says the publication date is 2005, but that seems late to me. I feel like it was before that. It has a very nice
Katherine: cover.
Brian: It does! Which is why I feel like it is. So now I
more