Institutional Gaslighting in the Church: Rewriting the Stories of Those They Harmed

When you leave a church, step down from a ministry role, stop working for — or openly challenge — an institution like the Church, something quietly unsettling happens. The friends, colleagues, and pseudo-spiritual leaders who once couldn’t speak highly enough of you — who leaned on your judgment, praised your contribution, and called you “such a blessing” or “awesome” — begin to drift away. Invitations taper off. Messages go unanswered. Smiles become strained, then disappear altogether. When your usefulness ends, so does your visibility.

It is slow, almost invisible at first. Emails take longer to receive replies. Conversations stiffen. Messages sit on “read” for days… then weeks… and then nothing. Silence. The silence isn't angry. It is a quiet and subtle severing, as if your worth existed only within the ecosystem of the institution. Once you step outside its walls, you become inconvenient — a reminder of things they do not want to face, a story they are no longer sure they are allowed to know.

It stings. Not because you expected lifelong loyalty, but because you believed the relationships were real.

People who once greeted you with warmth now look past you, as though you have become a complication.

Colleagues who depended on your experience suddenly insist they are “not up to date” or “unable to comment.” Over time, you realise just how many of those relationships were conditional — conditional on your role, your silence, your obedience, your place in the hierarchy, your seat at a table that only ever had room for you while you stayed in line.

See nothing, Hear nothing, Say nothing

When you leave — whether by choice or by necessity — you discover who truly loved you and who only loved the role you played. You learn who saw your humanity and who merely valued your utility. In unhealthy institutional cultures, relationships do not function like friendships; they function like machinery. Once a cog is removed, the system simply rearranges itself and keeps moving. That's business.

In the midst of disorientation and grief, something unexpected can begin to take root: the rediscovery of your inherent worth, separate from roles, titles, teams, and from those who only ever knew you within a narrow and convenient timeframe.

The visible acts of withdrawal — cancelled meetings, unanswered messages, quiet exclusions — are only surface signals. Beneath them lies a far more destabilising dynamic: institutional gaslighting, conveyed through the carefully modulated, reassuring tones of the Church.

You raise serious concerns — stalking, harassment, safeguarding failures, emotional coercion, abuse of power — and instead of acknowledgement, you are met with polished contradictions:

“That’s not how we understood it.

”“There may be a misunderstanding.”

“Perhaps you were under a lot of pressure.”

Your experiences are reframed as misunderstandings. Your distress is softened into “complexity.” Your evidence becomes “perception.” You are thanked for your honesty, while nothing substantively changes.

Gaslighting

On the surface, these responses sound pastoral — even tender. In truth, they are calculated and corrosive. They do not heal; they erode. They destabilise your memory. They dismantle your certainty. They take what you lived through and systematically recast it as misinterpretation, exaggeration, emotional instability.

This is not care. It is concealment. It is the quiet engineering of self-doubt. And because the Church is bound up with identity, calling, and belonging, the damage does not stop at professional confidence. It invades the deepest places of the self. It fractures the soul. It severs trust — in others, in God, in your own perception of reality. It is not just wounding. It is spiritual violence.

The confusion — and the gaslighting — deepens for many clergy, staff, and victim-survivors when you finally discover who is shaping these conversations. Increasingly, the Church’s safeguarding structures are populated and led by former police officers: people trained to prioritise offences, evidence, and thresholds above anything else. It is framed as “professionalisation.” In reality, it imports a policing mindset into what should be a pastoral, trauma-informed space.

Survivors come seeking safety and instead meet investigative logic. Harassed clergy, bullied parish staff, curates stretched to breaking point — all find themselves trying to articulate forms of harm that fall outside criminal definitions but are devastating nonetheless. You speak about grooming dynamics, coercive pastoral practices, vocational manipulation, emotional intimidation — and the response is filtered through evidential criteria rather than human experience.

The questions shift:

Not “What happened to you?”

but “Can this be proven?”

Not “Are you safe?”

but “Is this actionable?”

When safeguarding becomes a system of thresholds instead of care, you enter meetings hoping to be understood and leave feeling assessed and pathologised. Where has our moral compass gone?

Then comes the convergence: ex-police safeguarding staff and senior leaders aligning their authority. One group declares, “There is no evidence.” The other assures, “The matter has been reviewed.”

Together, they construct a narrative—and in that neat, rehearsed chorus, your own story begins to fade from the record.

People around you absorb it without question. Friends who once admired your integrity now hesitate. Clergy who once sought your discernment retreat into polite neutrality, fearful of standing beside someone the institution has quietly marked as a troublemaker. And bishops — called to be shepherds and truth-tellers — withdraw into silence. That silence becomes a verdict, and it burns in your throat.

When leadership appears unconcerned, believing you feels disloyal. When safeguarding dismisses your experience, supporting you feels dangerous. And so the ranks close, leaving you standing alone in the widening gap between your truth and their need for institutional stability.

This isolation becomes its own form of harm. You replay events, scrutinise details, question yourself. You wonder how people who once trusted your character can so readily align with systems designed to preserve themselves.

Speaking truth into an institution skilled in narrative preservation feels like dropping a stone into deep water. The splash disappears instantly, and the silence that follows is suffocating.

To the victim-survivors. To the bullied staff. To the harassed clergy. To the overwhelmed laity. To those who were gaslit, silenced, spiritualised into submission, or made to doubt the evidence of their own spirit and mind:

You are not imagining this.

You are not too sensitive.

You are not rebellious, bitter, disloyal, or confused.

You are not alone — even when isolation was part of the design.

You are not the problem in a system that survives by making truth-tellers feel expendable.

Your voice matters. Your story holds weight. Your truth is still sacred.

Beneath that silence, one thing remains immovable: the truth of your experience.

It does not shrink because others refuse to acknowledge it. Harm does not vanish because it cannot be criminally categorised. Safeguarding does not become safe because it is overseen by people with investigative rankings in their past. And your integrity does not evaporate because the Church finds it inconvenient.

What happened still happened.

Your clarity remains clarity.

Your integrity remains intact.

Institutions may try to rewrite the story — but they cannot undo the truth.

Michelle Burns

~Guarding the Flock