The Wrong Way to Handle Being Shunned – Effects of Shunning on Christians

All I could picture was my pastor’s wife (Jane) with her rectangled bifocals dripping low on her nose as she offered that disapproving look–one eyebrow raised, lips smacked tightly together– just like she often did during one of our ladies’ Bible studies. “To despair is to turn your back on God,” channeling a throaty, Marilla voice.

Her heated stare filed down my thoughts like an unbearable screeching of fingers on chalkboard or whatever sound fills your mind with the weight and pressure that makes you hide your face in anything near you. I was trying to push my temples through the wall. Maybe inside I would be insulated from her look and statement, “By their fruit you shall know them.” 

Stupid fruit. Stupid, stupid fruit. I crouched down lower and lower into the floor as the visions hovered well above me almost into the clouds. I imagined her rising ‘til she was just about to whisper to God, “By her fruit we shall know her.” “Depart from me you workers of iniquity,” she nodded up and down and up and down. He must have been agreeing with her. 

Somehow, I couldn’t tuck up small enough, and the walls weren’t doing me any favors shutting me out of them like this. It was as if my legs and arms had grown, and I was as tall as I had wished I could have been in my childhood. My phone screen lit up, but it wasn’t a message from Jordan (my best friend). Just a Sleeper notification about an athlete who committed suicide. A little jolt in my chest flared as I read the excerpt, and I tapped over to iMessage. I wrote out the whole cliché with the classic, “Please, please just answer me.” And the pleading, “I have no one.” And the bargaining, “What can I do? Please just respond to me, or I don’t know what I’ll do . . . .” Plenty of things that have been said many times by those hunching on their bathroom floor with only despair and thought for friends. 

Select all. Delete. 

Me of Shunnybrook Farm

The shunting noise of the door that we could never quite get to stop sticking made me lock my eyelids together as tightly as possible; there was no shutting off the light. He seemed upset or blurry or something. I felt an arm tuck under my elbow, and he pulled me up. “I have no one,” I don’t think it was very audible, but he hugged me as though he heard. 

When people say they saw fear in someone’s eyes, that just means they’re taking the easy way out. What does fear in someone’s eyes actually look like? Squinting? Widening? No one really looks closely at pupils to see whether the fight or flight response is actually occurring. I don’t know what his pupils looked like because the whole room seemed to have a haze over it like a wavy summer afternoon where the distance kind of crinkles at the edges. I had a habit at the time of just staring while he talked. He was apologizing for the big fight–for leaving me alone and doing the classic storm off out of the room move. That had always been my cue to text my best friend a gif of Paris Geller saying, “I’m sorry, have I ever been mistaken for a patient person?” Or perhaps even, “I already wrote his name in my revenge notebook.” I’d send laugh emojis at her gifs, and then I’d fall asleep with 19 Kids and Counting on the TV. Instead, my text threads showed only my last message to her from a couple of weeks prior–unanswered. 

What Effects Do Shunned Individuals Experience?

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) feels like just a fancy word for feeling bummed out, and I’m pretty sure I texted that gif to my cousin at some point. My mind leaned on all those thoughts that will get attention from people, and composed all those words that maybe would make her respond. Vivid outlines of the “pastor” and his wife with pointing fingers and labels over their mouths with words like “gossip” and “uncontrolled” or “feminist” printed in giant, hasty letters. You just can’t rip off a name tag that says, “Sinner” on it, no matter how much you’ve practiced and taught argument. Because the labelers control the message, and they’d just shortened the panels in Jordan’s cage.

In my office, staring turned to habit. Grading and emails multiplied. I’d wish I were sitting with my guitar re-playing “As The Deer” until I finally got the timing down because my mind filled only with the notes on the page and avoiding buzz in the strings. There was talk of a sabbatical and the idea of a therapeutic retreat—recommendations from my therapist. If you stopped reading because I used the word, “therapist” (and not just because my writing is sort of meh) I’m right there with you. Ol’ Johnny shook his finger many times from the pulpit on the evils of psychology. I agree that the Bible has everything we need, but sometimes we need help applying it from a licensed professional. Just saying that and I see Jane’s lowered glasses look again . . . .

Depression fills just one check box in the list of how ostracism affects a person. Punitive Ostracism, the use of shunning or cutting someone out in order to punish or control another person, results not only in physical pain via raised blood pressure, increased cortisol levels, and “activation of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex of the brain”—literally the pain and stress reaction felt in your brain and body (Boykina 130). While I have zero clue where the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex of the brain is, I have a very real sense of the way it feels as you experience it: it sucks. It’s hiding your head in the wall kind of agony.

With three stages on the journey through ostracism, the first sign is the reflex of an individual facing the shunning: pain, sadness, anger, feeling like you don’t belong, low self-esteem, lack of control, questioning the meaningfulness of existence (131). In other words, those being shunned experience real trauma, which can damage the psychology and well-being of those individuals. Add to these feelings the complexity of your religious well-being, and you’ve got a recipe for feeling pretty lousy. I’m pretty sure this tactic is praised in the 990th chapter of Nowhere in the Bible. 

Consider this–if you once lived your life according to the tenets of the church where you attended, and suddenly the people there whom you respected cut you off for “being in sin,” how are you going to feel? Because now not only is that message a kick in the gut on a secular level, but it’s also difficult to remove the idea that those people represent God and His feelings toward you. In that way, the beliefs that once anchored you are now swinging that anchor wildly by its chain in your direction. Purpose and guidance become a catalyst to leave the faith. 

Merging the feelings of sinful humans–abusive actions included–with God’s feelings and intents can enslave anyone, which is one reason that shunning is almost never an instrument to “bring sinners back into the fold,” but almost always to ensure that they never return to your particular flock. It is a tactic so antithetical to Christianity that those enacting it are instantly speaking from both sides of their mouths. Tastes somewhat Orwellian, yah?

Once you’ve been psychologically and physiologically altered by the trauma of shunning, you will generally fall into one of two responses: pro-social and anti-social (Welfer and Scheithauer 224). Pro-social responses are the hopeful reactions we can gain through God’s help and leading; we adjust to the new if we accept the old.

Gather a little more context for my reactions here in my introduction post, “Why We Finally Left an Abusive Church after Ten Years.”

Coming Soon: “How I Stopped Letting the Shunning Have Power Over Me” for the method I followed to reach a plane of acceptance and adjustment–of course, this writing is part of that healing process for me. But why do some people practice shunning? Our next article will detail “Why Some Christians Practice the Abusive and UnChristian Belief of Shunning.”

Works Cited

Boykina, E. E. “Ostracism and Related Phenomena: Review of Foreign Studies.” Psihologiâ i Pravo, vol. 9, no. 3, 2019, pp. 127–40, doi.org/10.17759/psylaw.2019090310.

Wölfer, R. and H. Scheithauer. “Ostracism in Childhood and Adolescence: Emotional, Cognitive, and Behavioral Effects of Social Exclusion” Journal Social Influence. Routledge. 2013. vol. 8. no. 4. pp. 217—236. doi:10.1080/15534510.2012.706233