Why You Feel Like the “Problem” at Church

Have you ever felt like the “problem person” at church no matter how hard you tried?

In this episode of Hey Tabi, licensed trauma therapist Tabitha Westbrook explores what happens when churches unconsciously — or intentionally — scapegoat members instead of addressing dysfunction within the system itself.

Tabitha also explains how church scapegoating mirrors coercive control dynamics often seen in abusive relationships — including denial, minimization, emotional punishment, social isolation, and rewriting reality.

If you’ve ever:

• Felt spiritually unsafe in church
• Been labeled “divisive” for asking questions
• Lost community after speaking up
• Experienced church hurt after disclosing abuse
• Felt like leadership made you the problem instead of addressing real issues

…this episode is for you.

This conversation is honest, trauma-informed, compassionate, and deeply needed.

Resources Mentioned:

Transformational Topics Community - app.helloaudio.fm/feed/6907e1ce-23d2-4296-835e-5b478472f514/signup

Healthy Relationships Online Course - Use code RESET24 for 80% off - https://taking-every-thought-captive.teachable.com/p/relationships

At The Journey and The Process we strive to help you heal. Our therapists are trauma specialists who use evidence-based tools like EMDR, Brainspotting, Somatic Experiencing, and Internal Family Systems to help you heal - mind, soul, and body. Reach out today to start your healing journey. https://thejourneyandtheprocess.com/

 This book is for every Christian woman who has been harmed sexually, whether that happened in childhood, adulthood, or even within your coercive controlling marriage, and you're longing to feel safe in your body again. We talk about the hard stuff, shame, desire, faith, and even questions like, is this sin or is this trauma?

You don't have to untangle it alone. Body & Soul, Healed & Whole is for you. Get a copy here today - https://a.co/d/8Jo3Z4V

👍 If this episode resonated with you, please like, subscribe, and share to help others who need this information!

📖 Order Body & Soul, Healed & Whole: An Invitational Guide to Healthy Sexuality After Trauma, Abuse, and Coercive Control

Wanna support Hey Tabi? Buy me a coffee here - https://buymeacoffee.com/heytabi

📩 Connect with Tabitha & The Journey and The Process:
💻 Tabitha's Website - www.tabithawestbrook.com
📲 Tabitha's Instagram - www.instagram.com/tabithathecounselor
🎙️ Podcast Homepage - https://heytabi.buzzsprout.com

💻 The Journey & The Process Website - www.thejourneyandtheprocess.com

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel & watch podcast episodes there

🚨 Disclaimer: This podcast is not therapy and is intended for educational purposes only. If you're in crisis or need therapy, please reach out to a licensed mental health professional.

Need to know how to find a great therapist? Read this blog post here.

Transcript

Welcome And The Core Question

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Do you feel like the problem member of your church? Like, no matter what you do, it is never quite right. You show up, you serve, you try, and somehow you are still the one getting pulled aside, you're getting talked about, or you might even be getting pushed over into the margins. If this sounds like your experience, I'm gonna invite you to lean in because this is what we're gonna talk about today on this week's episode of Hey Tabby. Welcome to Hey Tabby, the podcast where we talk about the hard things out loud with our actual lips. We'll cover all kinds of topics across the mental health spectrum, including how it intersects with the Christian faith. Nothing is off limits here, and we are not take two verses and call me in the morning. I'm Tabitha Westbrook, and I'm a licensed trauma therapist, but I'm not your trauma therapist. I'm an expert in domestic abuse and coercive control and how complex trauma impacts our health and well-being. Our focus here is knowledge and healing. Trauma doesn't have to eat your lunch forever. There is hope. Now, let's get going. Welcome to this week's episode of Hey Tabby. I am Tabitha Westbrook and I am a licensed trauma counselor. On our practice blog a couple of weeks ago at The Journey and the Process, our amazing clinician Gwen Sote wrote about the family scapegoat. So we're in the middle of a series right now on family roles, and that was the role that we had that week. And it really made me think about how this also plays out in church culture at times. So today we're going to talk about what it looks like when church leaders either consciously or not make one or more of their congregants the carrier of the entire system's dysfunction. So before we dive in, let's

Church Scapegoating And DARVO

SPEAKER_00 1:45

just do a quick check-in and let's see if any of these land for you. You feel like the problem member of your congregation. You're blamed for conflict or attention that was never fully yours to own. Your mistakes or your perceived mistakes are brought up over and over and over. Your gifts, your contributions, any spiritual growth you might have are minimized, ignored, or picked apart. You feel emotionally excluded from the community that you call home. You've learned to stay quiet or shrink yourself, or you overexplain to try to avoid criticism from leadership. You feel responsible for keeping the peace even when you're actually hurting. And you feel misunderstood by the people who are supposed to be shepherding you. Your faithfulness might seem overlooked, and your growth again is pushed aside or completely ignored or minimized. You were blamed for the conflict, for division, for tension, even if it's not yours to carry. And you likely learned again to become or to stay small. Maybe you really leaned into that role that they gave you. You became divisive and difficult and spiritually immature in ways. You became rebellious or you felt rebellious. You felt like you were too much because some part of you started to believe it. So these are the feelings that we tend to carry if we are the scapegoat. Now, don't get me wrong, there are divisive members in churches at times, and they do cause issues. There are often folks who are unhealed in one area or another, and they just tend to cause a lot of problems and a lot of strife. That's not what I'm talking about here. First of all, we should treat those people with grace and invite them into a different place as well. But what I'm talking about here are reasonable people who are not at all, you know, causing unnecessary division or anything like that. What I'm talking about in this particular episode is when the system itself is confronted with something that is broken or not appropriate, and the whistleblower or the truth teller is made out to be the issue instead of the issue itself. It's essentially an abuse tactic called Darvo, deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender. And the people or the person who speak up, they're the ones that are made out to be the bad guy. So before we dive even more deeply into this, I want to talk about where the term scapegoat actually comes from. Did you ever think about this? Do you know this? It's in the Old Testament, actually. And in Levitical law, the scapegoat was symbolic of the sins of the congregation. So the priest would place the sins of the people of Israel on the head of the goat, and then the goat itself would be cast out of the community, and that would take the guilt of the community with it. And it was meant to be a cleansing to the people of God and a sign of God's mercy. Much like then the scapegoat person takes on the sins of others and gets cast out. But here's the thing: that is no longer God's mercy. We don't need

Signs You Are Being Targeted

SPEAKER_00 5:02

a scapegoat to absolve us of guilt. And after Jesus' sacrifice on the cross, we don't have to follow Levitical law. So when the leaders place all of their sins on top of a whistleblower simply for asking reasonable questions, then they are actually the ones out of line. So let's get a little bit of definition going here on this. The scapegoated congregants are perceived as the problem members. And if you're not watching this, I just totally air quoted that. They're termed to be the divisive ones, the black sheep of the church family. They're the people who can do no right in the eyes of leadership. They become the emotional and spiritual dumping ground for the church system, and they carry blame so that the leaders and others don't have to face their own shame, their unresolved conflict, or dysfunction. I have been in the position where I was one of the scapegoated people that, you know, I spoke truth into a system that was definitely not following Jesus. And there were some really difficult things. And I was vilified for it. In fact, everybody stopped talking to me. I was pushed out of group chats and things like that. And it was heartbreaking. And this is not what the church is supposed to do at all. And it can cause really deep spiritual wounding in those who are scapegoated. So what does it look like if you are being scapegoated? Like what are some of the signs this might be happening for you? Well, you're watched with suspicion rather than being welcomed with openness. I've talked with clients who, you know, after they brought up an issue in a church space or disclosed issues of abuse or coercive control, that people stopped talking to them. So when they would come into the church, they would get side-eyed, they would get these glances, there would be furtive whispers. And instead of being, you know, embraced, they were shunned. And that's a heartbreaking place to be. It's awful. Scapegoats are almost always also cast in a negative light by those who are in authority. That might be something like, oh, she's just a Jezebel. You really got to stay away from her, or hey, we really just need to pray for so-and-so because they're just really losing the way and they're backsliding, you know. And while asking for prayer could be a perfectly reasonable thing when prayer is used for gossip and harm, that's not prayer at all, actually. That is an abuse tactic. And so, you know, suspicion is cast on this individual. And then other people think, oh gosh, I can't be around them. This could be very dangerous and problematic. So I'm gonna steer clear of them. Scapegoats also can feel really invisible in the community, much like a scapegoat in the family feels really just isolated, even when there are other people around them. That can feel the same way for someone who's being scapegoated within the church as well. And this can happen even when the church looks vibrant and connected. And, you know, it seems like, you know, everyone is absolutely, you know, in this familial type of relationship. So what people might see from the outside might look very different to what the scapegoat is experiencing. Because again, like things around them look fine and normal, but the way that they are treated is not. And instead of taking accountability for how this person is being treated, leadership often justifies it. In fact, I'd also say they perpetuate it. So they might point to past behaviors, uh perceived attitudes, or a conflict that is evidence of this person being the source of the problem. Oh, you know, they just really don't like pastor so-and-so. So they just keep bringing things up. They always have a complaint. And I think for women in the church in particular, who raise issues and sound the alarms on destructive tendencies or systems or things like that, very often we worry about being, you know, too vociferous on things that we're concerned about, or I don't want to be perceived as the problem, so I'm afraid to bring this up. That happens so much. I talk with so many people who feel that exact thing. And, you know, if all of these things, you know, that I am talking about feel really familiar to you, you might also be like, gosh, doesn't this sound like coercive control dynamics? And it does. This is very much minimizing. You know, this didn't really happen. It wasn't that bad, denying you're completely wrong that didn't happen that way. And blaming. If you weren't so divisive or so difficult, then you know it'd be easier to be around you or whatever. And those are the things that we see in coercively controlling relationships and in coercively controlling or high controlling systems. So if you are the scapegoat, it feels so isolating. It's again, just like if you were being scapegoated as a family member, it's not any different in how it feels in the church. It's profoundly spiritually disorienting. It is so difficult. Like many victims of spiritual abuse. And I would say that scapegoating someone is spiritually abusive. Those who are branded as scapegoats really, honestly, very often genuinely love Jesus and want to follow him. And being a truth teller and saying, hey, I see this thing in this system that isn't going well, or there's abusive behavior over here, I'm experiencing, you know, abusive behavior and coercive control in my marriage, like there is this heart when you bring that up that there will be restoration and healing. And so when you feel like you're being blamed for bringing up very real issues, it can be absolutely exhausting and truly disheartening. You know, there's so many folks that I have worked with who said, I just wanted there to be repentance and healing. And what I got was harmed instead. And I think, you know, if you're a leader listening to this, I just want to lean into that with you that when people are bringing things up, it's oftentimes not to cause problems, but to alleviate problems and to bring real healing. And for some people, they just try to stay in the system and conform and just go, okay, I'll do what you want me to do. And sometimes people continue to try to lean in and affect change. And that can be really hard. So, you know, in in some ways, you're darned if you do and darned if you don't, really. So it can really look like, hey, there are people who say just get out and run, but I don't feel like God is saying that. I feel like God is telling me to lean into this system. And so the system itself isn't appreciative. And the people who are outside the system telling you to run aren't appreciative. And that can feel really tricky. It can feel really, really tricky. Being scapegoated can also lead to strange relationships, as people are told either explicitly or implicitly to stay away from you. That can be an absolutely brutal experience. I know, in a situation that I was in in a spiritually abusive environment, I was ostracized. And so people that were once my friend were told you shouldn't hang out with her, you should not be around her. And I was all of a sudden cast out of a system that I was very integral in. I was, you know, served and was in Bible study and did all of these different things. And, you know, we used to joke at this particular church that I needed to have a shower put in because I was always there. So I might as well just start sleeping at the building, which has its own set of issues. And we'll talk about that sometime of just like over-serving and burning people out and whatnot. But when all of this stuff went down and I was asking questions, I was pushed aside. So imagine your whole world being one thing. And some of you really do know this very well. Your whole world being this church family, and then all of a sudden feeling like an orphan, like, oh my gosh, that is so heartbreaking and so wounding and so traumatic. And when all of this happens in the name of God, it can feel like God Himself is against you. And if you have a really high control system, then they act as if they speak for God. And so when this happens, you're like, God is against me. And that takes a while and healing to disentangle that because it looks nothing like God, but it sure feels like him at times. And that's just awful. So, how does this even happen in a place that is supposed to look like Jesus? I think that's the million-dollar question, right? How does this even occur? Well, one way is that the system itself is dysfunctional. There's no way to escalate issues or even have them investigated or addressed. Or maybe even the leaders themselves have unresolved trauma and it's being acted out and how they lead. This is something that I think about a lot and that therapists are told often we can't take anyone where we won't go ourselves. So think about that. If I am unhealed, I can't help someone else heal if I'm not willing to heal. I think that's a really wise thing for pastors to also consider. If you have unhealed areas, then you are going to harm other people. And for some leaders, that harm isn't intentional. And I know for some listening, that might be really hard to believe if you have been harmed, but it is true. If this is how the system functions and they don't know any different, then they might just be doing what they have always done, which is not an excuse. I'm not excusing harm through that at all. But if you don't see it, it can take a while to recognize it. And that itself can then perpetuate further harm, which is awful. So what do we do about this? Can it even be addressed in a church system? Well, I do believe that it can be, but I believe it starts with real humility of leadership and a heart that is ready to learn and grow. Truly, the best posture we can all have is to have a teachable heart, to want to be a lifetime learner and to be always seeking God Himself and not what man tells us about God, but actual God. When we have that posture, it's a lot easier than to make a course correction when we get off course. And we will, like nobody's perfect. So it's what we do with it, right? So, like we talk about this with parents and how to have healthy attachment with your children. When you make a mistake, it's not

Why Healthy Churches Still Harm

SPEAKER_00 16:08

ignoring that mistake, it's making repair because everybody's gonna make a mistake, but how you handle repair is often then what dictates the health of the relationship. And so that's really what we want to do here is have that humility, that posture of heart to be able to say, I need to do something different. I messed up. You know, I was recently invited to speak to a book club that had read my book, Body and Soul Healed and Whole. And when we met together, one of the questions that they ask, you know, of the people who've read the book is, what didn't you agree with or what do you think was wrong? I think that is a fantastic question. I know that it can be really disheartening to ask that to the author when they are right there with you, but I was all for it. Is there something I missed or misstated that you feel like I should do differently? Let's talk about that. Because I always want to have the humility of heart to say I was wrong. I didn't do that correctly, and I want to try to do something different. So I think that that posture of heart is one that we should all seek. And again, we're not gonna get it perfect all the time, but we definitely want to be able to enter into those types of conversations. Now, before we move on, speaking of conversations, I want to talk to you quickly about our transformational topics community. This is a private podcast community where once a month you get an episode deep dive on a particular topic done by one of our amazing experts, one of our licensed clinicians or one of our certified coaches that just brings you through a topic. And each subsequent week, you are going to get another resource. So it might be a worksheet, it might be more audio that you can maybe do a mindfulness with. There's all kinds of different resources that we have for those who are in our transformational topics community. It is a super simple community to join. It's just 10 bucks a month. We'll have the link in the description below. Come check us out and join the community. We also have quarterly Zoom calls where we can all get together and you have access to these amazing clinicians and coaches who can talk to you about the topics for that quarter. I hope that you will join us in the Transformational Topics community. Again, link in the description for this podcast and in the description below on YouTube. We would love to have you join us. So I'm gonna address the leaders first in this. Church leaders need to take accountability. There is so much healing in speaking the truth out loud, like with your actual lips, kind of like what we do on this podcast. When leaders genuinely acknowledge that there is a congregant or a group of congregants or parishioners, however you say it in your church, that has been made to carry things that they were never meant to carry that were not theirs. And they do this without deflecting, without spiritual bypassing, without any kind of qualification. That means there's no but this. It really opens the door for healing to begin. And that's important, right? If we don't acknowledge that there was harm, we can't ever heal it. Next, leaders need to really do their own work. That means not just examining, you know, what happened, but examining your intentions and your patterns. Coercive control is a pattern of behavior. And we want to seek guidance from a therapist, a mentor, somebody outside the system, ideally, or a spiritual director

Invitation To Transformational Topics

SPEAKER_00 19:38

to really get clarity. We want to learn to sit with discomfort and failure and honest feedback without projecting it outward. That can be very uncomfortable. And it's worthy work, though, right? When we can sit with discomfort of I've harmed somebody, that is a step toward healing. We have to own it. I think about how we talk about it in Men of Peace, seeing, owning, and turning. You have to see it. That's the first part, acknowledging it. And then you have to own it. What did I do before you can turn from it? And you have to really own the harm that you might have caused someone else. And that is a hard place to be, but it's really important. As you work toward healing, you want to respect the boundaries of those that have been hurt. Restoration may not be immediate and it may never look like that person returning to the community. But pressuring someone to reconcile publicly or move on, note the air quotes if you're not watching me, before they're ready to, honestly, is totally inappropriate. And it is not going to heal someone. In fact, it is control with a softer name. So it's control with pretty words attached. And quite frankly, it isn't godly. Real

What Leaders Must Do Next

SPEAKER_00 20:52

change always, always, always respects boundaries. We do not violate the autonomy and ability to have their own self of another person. We just don't. Now, for those who've been harmed, I want to encourage you to start by setting boundaries. You are allowed to have boundaries with your church. I know that that might feel weird. You're allowed to have them with church leaders and with the community as a whole if you need to, especially if that community has caused you harm. It is not unspiritual or ungodly to create distance. It is not rebellion to protect yourself. In fact, I like to remind people that Jesus, in fact, had boundaries. He went off on his own to pray. He didn't heal everybody everywhere. He always went. He took time to eat and he took time to rest. And he is God. So if God himself in the flesh had boundaries, then I would say that we are allowed to have them too. And remembering that boundaries are where we begin and end, what we are okay with, what we're not, and why we're there. And so, like when I set a boundary, it's not to make somebody else do something, it's letting people know what I am okay with and what I'm not. And we have other episodes that talk about boundaries and you can check those out. We don't have time, unfortunately, for a deep dive in how to set these boundaries or what boundaries look like. But I would encourage you to get more clarity on that if that's something that you need to. I have an entire skills class devoted to healthy relationships. I will link that in the show notes as well, along with a discount code if that's something that you would like to take advantage of. And that can help you really refine how you do relationship, how to start hard conversations and things like that. You also can work to reclaim your spiritual identity. As I mentioned before, anytime God gets weaponized, which is so heartbreaking, it can really mess with your spiritual identity. And so we need to work on recovering our sense of self. And there is really profound healing in that. There is profound healing in really reorienting yourself to who you are and who God is and how he sees you. And it isn't filtered then through the voices that harmed you, especially when the voices speak as if they speak for God. You have to do some disentangling. You're allowed to rediscover what you actually believe, what you actually feel, and what you actually need. You can ask hard questions of God. I recently spoke with Elizabeth Woodson, and you'll get to see her interview on this podcast, but we talked about God being able to handle the tension. And he is. It's all through scripture when you look at it. Moreover, you're even allowed to know yourself. I know that like anytime we talk about the self in the church, it can get really tricky because we're often told not to like think too highly of ourselves. And that is true, right? But we're also not supposed to think too lowly of ourselves and we should actually know ourselves. Right. If we're supposed to love others as we love ourselves, that does in fact mean that we have to know and love ourselves. And that is not actually selfishness, right? What it is, is working out your salvation and seeking God. And over and over in scripture, he invites us to seek him and says that he will be found. So asking yourself questions like, who are you because of who God says you are? What does that actually look like? What is God's actual posture toward you? And we have talked about this on the podcast in past episodes. What is God's face looking like when he turns it toward you? Sometimes we think of him as like an angry, mean dad. And that's not the posture he has toward you. All throughout scripture, we see what his face is toward you, and it is one of love and kindness. You can also evaluate your community, asking yourself, is it safe and healthy and worthy of staying in? If it's not, you might need to change community. And that is going to bring up real grief because it's an actual loss. So many times my clients will tell me, I shouldn't feel this bad. And I'm like, why shouldn't you? It's a stunning loss, especially when you've given time, energy, your life, your connections to a place and a people, and then you've been rejected and you've been pushed out. Like, of course you're going to grieve that. It's like a death. And I'm not being hyperbolic when I say that at all. That's very much how it feels. And so you need to be able to sit within process and explore that grief because that is going to be there for you. And if you're not ready to be back in a church community, so you're not going to go from one to another, you might start with a therapist who really does understand spiritual abuse and religious trauma and who can walk with you on your healing journey and help you work through the traumatic experiences. That is something that we do often with people at the journey and the process. It's a thing that unfortunately we have to do. I'd love for us to be out of business and not have to do this, but finding a therapist that really gets it and understands it and can walk with you in it and help you disentangle any faulty beliefs and teaching is such a gift and such a help sometimes. And then slowly you can find a space to engage in again. Sometimes that's going to be a different church or even an entirely different denomination. Sometimes that might be healing in your current community if it allows you to be safe and to stay and heal in that place. So sometimes communities do, in fact, repent and they do change and they do make the changes necessary. And so then you can actually continue or work on healing in your own community and not have to leave. I will say that's much more rare, although I hope it's getting less rare as people grow and learn and pastors grow and learn and leaders grow and learn. So one important thing here that I want you to know is that you're not the one who is supposed to hold all that guilt. If you were the truth teller and you got pushed out because of it, I just want to remind you that that is

Boundaries Healing And Finding Safety

SPEAKER_00 27:12

not how God sees you. God does not see you as the black sheep. He is not okay with you being the scapegoat. He sees you as his beloved child and he does not condone anything that was done to harm you. And if you are a leader listening to this, I just want to encourage you, really look at the system in your church. Does it help or harm? Are there areas that need to be changed that might be causing harm to others, even if you didn't mean it? Have you considered talking to your congregants or parishioners, the men and women, the married, the unmarried, the old and the young to see if there are blind spots? Like, man, none of us are omniscient. None of us can future tell. And if you can, then I would like the lottery numbers, if you don't mind, right? Like we all have some blind spots. And it's great to be able to ask what's happening, where are mine? Where are the system's blind spots? And really be curious about that. And I really encourage you, do that with a humble heart. If there's been harm caused, make amends, make that repair. Repent, do your work, any work that you need to do, and then engage in repair. Sometimes that might mean stepping away if the harm was egregious. Um, I have a friend that says, you know, you can serve Jesus and work at Best Buy. Sometimes the gracious, kind, and sometimes very hard thing to do is to step away and to go do something else because of the harm that's been caused. That actually is so much more holy than I think we give it credit for. And I just want to encourage you really take a look at it. What needs to happen? Where is goodness and where is not goodness? And then what would God have you do with that? Really seek the Lord for that. The church is a beautiful place, and sometimes it's a really messy space. And I think that a lot of healing can happen if we approach each other with honesty and with humility. And I really pray that we learn to love each other well and that we seek Jesus with all that we have. If we do that, we're gonna look so much more like him, honestly. And churches are going to look so much more like him. I want to thank you for spending time with me on this week's episode of Hey Tabby. Be sure that you like and subscribe and turn on your notifications if you watch this on YouTube so that you do not miss a single episode. I am grateful for each listener and each watcher. Thank you so much for being here, and I look forward to seeing you next time. Thanks for joining me for today's episode of Hey Tabby. If you're looking for a resource that I mentioned in the show and you want to check out the show notes, head on over to tabithawestbrook.com forward slash hey tabby. That's H E Y T A B I, and you can grab it there. I look forward to seeing you next time.