Being Told to "Get Over It and Move On"

"Just get over it and move on with God." We hear this phrase way too many times coming from well-intentioned people regarding our spiritually abusive experiences. It sounds great on paper, but in reality it is impossible. You will never "get over" spiritual abuse - you just need to get through it. For example, a rape victim cannot just "get over it and move on". They need to process their grief, and deal with the pain and emotional trauma. It's the same for spiritual abuse victims. You cannot just stuff it all to be "religiously correct", because it will never go away.

The phrase "get over it and move on" is a term that was authored and abused by authoritarian spiritual abusers to get their followers to turn their brains off so that they won't think for themselves. I can remember this phrase being used on me so many times. Whenever I showed any human emotion whatsoever, I was told to "rise up" and "get over it and move on". I would choke back my pain and grief, and stuff my emotions. While it may be the only way to win on a battlefield, it is simply not a healthy way to deal with all of life's issues. It simply serves to get you to stop analyzing and thinking for yourself.

I was an emotional basket case for the first few years after escaping my spiritually abusive situation. All of the pent-up grief, stifled anger, and repressed frustrations came tumbling out of the closet that I had been stuffing it in for years. It took quite a while to sort through all of it. Fortunately I turned immediately to educating myself about spiritual abuse, which made it much more understandable. Many people deal with spiritual abuse and don't even know what it is. It really helps to get educated on the topic.

Let's face it, if there really was a healthy way to "get over it and move on", there would not be a need for websites like this one. In my opinion, you cannot just "move on" or escape from a spiritually abusive experience. You must go through it (the recovery process), and eventually you get to the other side. It's a journey that takes time. The only way to "move on" would be to go back and erase the abuse that you experienced. Since you cannot do that, you just go through it. I think of it as a withdrawal from a dangerous addictive drug.

I have found that before I was able to go through a grieving process, I had to allow myself to become angry about the abuse I suffered. In the group that I was involved with, we were taught to passively allow someone to use and abuse us. Through this process we learn to stuff all of our emotions. This can result in people not allowing themselves to get angry when someone violates your personal boundaries - or when they do, it becomes passive/aggressive. I'm not talking about going out and beating your abuser with a ball bat, but rather, just getting mad enough inside to evict the passivity that we allowed to rule us. This passivity is the force that caused us to not only allow the abuse, but also to stuff sadness, anger, grief, and even our ability to be analytical and skeptical about what we were being taught.

Once we begin thinking for ourselves again and getting our ability to say "no" back, a flood of emotions may come back to us: anger, grief, and sometimes even hate. Anger will turn to grief, and then we can process the grief to get rid of the anger. Tolerance of our abuse will turn to hate, and then we can process the hate to bring about true forgiveness and build healthy boundaries to keep it from happening again. Sadness about being a victim will drive us to break out of our isolation, and we can begin to trust again.

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