The Cult of Christian Inner Healing Prayer Ministry

CW: spiritual and emotional abuse

Conspirituality Episode 47

By now, unless you are new (in which case I’m not sure whether to say I’m sorry, or possibly sup, welcome to the shitshow), you’ve heard my story and the follow up post about my experience with “inner healing prayer ministry” administered by one Denise Richeson Hughes of her own 501c3 nonprofit called Transformation Ministries, Inc., founded in the fair city of Nashville, TN.

Recently my friend and advocate, Dr. Stephanie Krehbiel of Into Account, sent me this Conspirituality podcast episode, about Elena Brower of yoga and doTERRA double diamond presidential fame.

Minutes into the show, my thoughts were:

1. This is going to fuck me up, and
2. I’m going to write a profanity-laced Medium article about it.

So here I fucking am.

The Triple Threat

The similarities between Elena Brower and Denise Hughes are eerily familiar, but before this point, I had no language with which to talk about them. The host of Conspirituality, Mr. Matthew Remski, mentions the phrase triple threat co-opted from show business and repurposed within the realm of feminist-type female influencers to refer to women who have:

1. a charismatic persona
2. a very carefully cultivated image (in the show it was named as fashion sense, but I think the broader application is their public image in general), and
3. killer business instincts

This is the type of woman and the type of bullshit that I have, hands down, been most harmed by. And it finally gave me words with which to understand why I have come to develop a simultaneous fear and jealousy of this persona — why when I meet a new woman who seems overly interested in me, unusually nice, maternalistic, who has a flawless aesthetic AND who owns her own business (or ministry) (which is still a business, by the way), I feel this growing dread in the pit of my stomach, my bullshit detector activated. Coupled with the jealousy of automatically knowing she is already successful (or will be, shortly) just based on those 3 components. I’ve just never understood why…until now.

And what’s more, it helps me understand why I’m afraid of being this person — why, as I’ve moved into the realm of having to have a publicly visible profile in order to advertise my own peer support work, I have been reluctant to put myself out there, reluctant to appear to know the “right” people, hesitant to want to cultivate an image of someone who has everything together. Firstly, because I don’t, and that would be just that — an image, which is designed to sell, not necessarily designed to tell the whole truth.

And secondly, because in my experience, a woman who always knows the right words to say to a vulnerable person, in a podcast interview, and on her social media accounts, is someone who will eventually be shown to be an agent of destruction. I know what it’s like to be privately harmed by someone who is, universally, publicly adored.

And I don’t want to do that to anyone.

But social media favors this type of person. The algorithm and the preferences of consumers elevate the visibility of this carefully cultivated triple threat, who always knows the right things to do and always manages to look beautiful while doing it when in the public eye.

The truth is, I have never felt like I could truly be this person, so even were I to attempt it, I would feel horribly fake and I don’t think I could live with myself.

Here’s the Truth

I am not often well spoken. I get nervous during interviews. I trip over my words sometimes. I need time to process before I can thoroughly answer a question. I might be on the spectrum, and I definitely have social anxiety; I need to know how something might go before I can agree to it. I feel uncomfortable being the center of attention.

Furthermore, I don’t have the money to buy expensive furnishings nor the fashion sense to decorate my house with them in that posh-white-lady way. Thanks to decades of an eating disorder and chronic illness, I am no longer thin, and I haven’t given a shit about fashion over comfort in my clothing choices since it was necessary to survive high school.

Even in my private sessions with clients, I don’t always know the right thing to say, and I freely admit that when it happens. My thoughts barrel down the track at a rate that my voice is rarely able to keep up with. Sometimes I overfocus on what my clients are telling me and get caught up in the experience of trying to step into their shoes and feel what they’re feeling, and it keeps me from having an immediate suggestion. I have survived so much trauma in my own life (by way of dissociation) that I am not always very outwardly expressive of my internal reactions to people. The compassion and care I feel for my clients runs profoundly deep, but I worry often about whether they know that or not, because I can come across rather stoic.

I am also, at least in my own estimation… kind of boring. I’m super intelligent, I have a lot of interests and can converse about a really wide variety of topics, but my private life is… pretty unremarkable? And I’m not mad about it. Surviving the Squid Games of the first 3+ decades of my existence means that now that I’m almost 40, I welcome the peace and quiet, the mundaneness of making coffee in the morning light while my kids squabble, and watching the leaves fall from my trees as the birds and squirrels fight for the spoils of the bird feeders.

My life isn’t endlessly exciting; it’s definitely not one adventure after another, and most of it isn’t Instagram-worthy. And I’m actually pretty okay with that, because that sounds exhausting, and I’m exhausted.

It’s the paradox of feeling safe in being “not the right thing,” but also seeing this lack of being the right thing as the reason I’m unable to advance my career in even modest ways, for the very same reason. I don’t want to become what I fear, but it seems like maybe I have to, in order to achieve financial stability.

I don’t even want to be famous. I just want to pay my bills.

More Similarities: the “Workflow”

As Mr. Remski goes on to describe the “workflow” of a specific situation between Elena Brower and one of her constituents, I realized that it could summarize my entire relationship with Denise in a general sort of way.

His summary of the specific situation with Elena Brower went like this:

1. A charismatic leader has everyone’s attention;
2. They notice someone vulnerable in their vicinity;
3. They use the vulnerable person to demonstrate the magical quality of their material to their other followers.

This was the bird’s eye view of my relationship with Denise for the entire 4 years she worked with me. Except, for those in elevated positions in Christian inner healing prayer circles, it is less about exploiting a vulnerable person in front of an audience, and more about exploiting them to meet the emotional needs of the prayer minister.

Having said that, however, there were opportunities periodically at teaching conferences for attendees to volunteer to be part of a “demo” where the volunteer was brought to the front of the room and the minister would demonstrate their inner healing prayer techniques on the volunteer in front of the whole audience, for the sake of teaching it. I was a volunteer for one such demo, and although I didn’t and don’t feel I was egregiously harmed by that specific instance, the whole thing still reads as exploitative and manipulative, when looking back.

Christian inner healing prayer ministry is uniquely gifted at acting like what the minister is doing is in the best interest of the recipient, when, in reality, it’s actually about making the minister feel needed and special.

This can be hard to see on the surface. But it quickly becomes clear in light of the fact that rarely, if ever, do they request feedback on whether what they’re doing is helpful or not, and by the fact that for those stupid enough to offer feedback of any kind besides positive and affirming, the ministry will move swiftly to discredit and bury their perspective.

This was my experience; like Tatum Fjerstad, I was simply used as a prop.

Image is Everything

It has long troubled me that Christianity both creates attachment disorders in its followers (because the recipe is built into the theology) and then speaks the language of attachment to offer appealing — but ultimately empty — promises to maintain their hold on people. Conveniently, when the person starts to wake up to the fact that they are being sold an illusion, they are then blamed for their own brokenheartedness, and cast aside.

As noted in the podcast episode about Brower and countless others, this is an established pattern within exclusivist groups where being perceived in the desired way is more important to the leaders than caring about the harm they’re causing. To put a finer point on it, it is more important that the leaders in the Christian inner healing ministry circles are seen the way they want to be seen; the flavor of each image is going to be slightly different based on the individual, but more importantly, they want their followers to see the people telling the stories of harm that come from their work as outliers. To maintain their carefully crafted image, the leaders have to make sure the followers ultimately fault the person harmed rather than blame it on a flaw in the system or the leader.

The term “performative therapy abuse” is brought up several times — and although it isn’t a formal term for anything, I knew immediately what was meant by it when I heard it. The entirety of the inner healing prayer ministry faction could be summed up by those three words.

Inner healing prayer ministry seeks to help people recover from what they would call ungodly beliefs about the self that (they believe) originate from trauma during childhood. Other non-religious (e.g. coaching) groups would call them self-limiting beliefs. But leaders in both lanes, 9 times out of 10, are not always in possession of many legitimate tools to do this work, and most layman industries like these are without adequate accountability or oversight to enforce consequences for people who harm others.

A Confusion of Boundaries

The blurring and manipulation of boundaries were what kept my head spinning even while I was still fully under Denise’s spell. It seemed that the rules were always different for me, and when I tried to pin them down, they would change again.

She undoubtedly treated me differently than anyone else, but I never knew in advance if that would feel like a privilege or a rejection in any given situation. Sometimes others were publicly acknowledged in ways that I was not. Sometimes I was given privileges that — I was told — other clients were not given. After a certain period of time working together as minister/client (I can’t fathom how long it was), Denise allowed me to call her “Dee,” which was purportedly a nickname that only her closest and most cherished friends were allowed to use. Other times, she would respond to every comment on social media except mine. When asked, she would claim it to be an honest oversight, which I probably would have believed once, but it happened numerous times throughout the years. She continued to call me her “spiritual daughter,” but refused to spend any casual time with me once I became her client, and also wouldn’t intervene during a crisis outside of session time, despite telling me about her (and even her husband’s at the time) involvement in crises of other “spiritual kids” of theirs in their free time.

It was mind bending. Questions were met with veiled defensiveness and deflection. I quickly learned to just take what I was given and shut up about it.

Power in the Wrong Hands

The podcast does not overemphasize this, but does posit in a couple of different places: they believe the better alternative for help with personal problems is a licensed psychotherapist. Coming from a background of having known several good ones, this is understandable.

I cannot necessarily agree with this just as a matter of principle, though. Every time I rehash my story of what went on between me and Denise, my inbox is once again filled with people’s stories of similar experiences — and these include just as many stories of licensed therapists acting this way, as well.

In my opinion, licensing or lack thereof is not the issue. The issue is power in the wrong hands.

While there are predatory tools used to draw in vulnerable people that are unique to religious groups, ultimately the problem is not that those in charge are unlicensed and untrained. The problem is abuse of power. The problem is over-prioritization of image. The problem is the protection of an institution over and above the uplifting of those the institution claims to exist to serve.

Image source: Kevin Garcia on IG

Denise loved me, as long as loving me upheld her image in the context of her ministry and in the eyes of those she hoped to impress on her way up the ranks. Denise loved me, for as long as the experience and performance of loving me did not threaten her image.

This is not unique to religion. It is a danger where any institution exists, where the institution has become an entity unto itself and those who can maintain proximity to it reap rewards they cannot {as easily} acquire elsewhere.

Cognitive-Dissonant Messaging Within the Inner Healing Circle

As a ritual abuse case, I was a trophy held up by the ministry as proof of how skilled they were, that they had the ability to work with someone like me and effectively support me, when many other ministries (and even therapists) in the area refused to try. This served several purposes:

1. It gave them justifiable reasons to isolate me from other sources of support, since (as I mentioned in my first post) other people were not “qualified” to get to know me intimately without harming me;
2. It ingratiated me to them, because I was supposedly so fortunate that they were willing to try to help me since there were few other viable alternatives. Indeed, Denise repeated a story to me several times about how she had chosen to work with me because she felt like God had told her to do so, but since she only took on 1–2 ritual abuse cases at a time, it meant she’d had to turn down several others who were “crying and pleading and begging down on their knees” for her to help them. (Subtext: so you best be grateful for what you get from me, because other people aren’t so lucky.)
3. It also gave me the warped feeling of being special; that I was “chosen” by Denise to be a client when others had been rejected, which seems to me a prime example of stigmatizing AND co-opting vulnerability, as mentioned in the podcast.

I find it all rather ironic in retrospect, because one of the things Denise first told me when she accepted my request to work with me was that she’d intentionally waited until her children were grown so that she’d have “enough time” to work with a ritual abuse case. I’m not sure how much time she felt was “enough,” but she sure never seemed to have as much as she’d alluded to at the beginning.

Which was also part of the cognitive-dissonant messaging, but, Christian inner healing ministry style:

I waited until I could have adequate time for you…but I’m also always busy af and see you less often than any therapist would feel you needed to be seen.

You are more profoundly broken that most people…but that makes you even more special. By proximity it makes me more special since I can work with you when others can’t or won’t.

You are free to choose anything you want…but you should choose what I want you to choose.

What she ultimately wanted me to choose was to “heal” to whatever level she deemed acceptable and complete…and then become a ministry leader myself to perpetuate what I had learned from her (and, supposedly, become a credit to her and her ministry in everything else I did thereafter).

One of my last genuine email conversations with Denise came several months before I requested the conversation for closure, which blew up in my face and which I’ve explained in the aforementioned linked Medium posts.

In the email I said something to the effect of: I have outgrown the need for you or anyone else to define how healed or not-healed I have to be in order to go live my life.

I believe that was the moment we both knew that the facade that our relationship had been for the last 4 years was about to come crashing down. And that’s exactly what happened.

These Days

I no longer buy into the messaging of Christianity, that I am broken and in perpetual need of something to fix myself — something that only God (and his people) can provide. And periodically I still spend undue amounts of time doing things like writing Medium posts like this one, to try to convince others that they aren’t broken, either.

At least not in that particular way.

This is why I am writing my own online course material for people in the specific niche that I’ve come from, which I hope to release sometime next year. My hope is to work alongside therapists and clients, to bring the best of all worlds together.

I’ve also taken additional steps to do what I can to have accountability and oversight in an area where there isn’t much, as of yet. I employ my own supervisor in my peer work — an objective, compassionate person who knows me well but who will not just take my side in a conflict — so that my clients have recourse if they find themselves needing it. (In 4 years, no one has needed it so far.) And I continue to speak out about my experience with Christianity and the weird, culty innards of their version of trauma healing, called inner healing prayer ministry.