Writing "Sacred Wounds" with Teresa Mateus

In this Q&A, Teresa Mateus, author of Sacred Wounds: Finding Your Path to Healing from Spiritual Trauma, shares how she realized her work needed to become a book, why this second edition is relevant a decade after the first edition's release, and the best piece of wisdom or advice she's received.

Do you have a moment when you realized “this needs to be a book?” I remember being at a spirituality conference and I was speaking on trauma and spirituality, specifically about spirituality as a place to ground through traumatic experience, and I had person after person coming up to me afterward telling me their traumatic experience in their spiritual or religious context and asking almost the same question, “What you talked about, how trauma is, it feels like what I experienced inside of my religion, but is that a thing? I have never heard anyone talk about that as a kind of trauma.” It made me realize there was a whole focus of trauma inside of religious and spiritual contexts that was not visibilized, and many of these people (and so many others I would discover) were suffering in silence and isolation, feeling lonely and ashamed without having an understanding of the source. I decided then that I needed to begin studying this phenomenon, see how widespread it was, what the common areas of experience were and if there was a methodology I could create from listening to people’s stories of harm that could help support people finding their way out of the trauma of the experience. Even then I didn’t know it would become a book, but ultimately the stories kept coming and patterns began to arise and it felt like something that wasn’t yet being written about that needed some roadmap to help people stave off the isolation of their experience. 

What are you most passionate about right now? Often I look back on my life and feel like I have lived nine lives (or more) but the truth is the narrative of my life and work has had one thread that runs through it all - the study and practice of spirituality, healing and liberation. At the moment that work is expressing itself through my passion for reproductive justice and my correlating work as an early-stage doula, and, also, my work as a Ph.D. student and indigenous healing practitioner engaging with Andean indigenous approaches to spirituality, healing and environmental justice. Also, the embodiment of a human and its sovereignty and the embodiment of land and its sovereignty is inherently connected, especially from an indigenized perspective and, so, it also feels like part of the same work. 

What are you reading now – for work, for fun, for personal growth? This list could be endless but I will pick just a sampling of the things on my reading stack and in my Kindle. Drumming Our Way Home: Intergenerational Learning, Teaching, and Indigenous Ways of Knowing by Georgina Martin, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral by Phillis Wheatley, The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection by Dorceta E. Taylor, and for pure fun Cold Curses by Chloe Neil and Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (because I love paranormal fantasy and magical realism).

What makes this book relevant today and different from other books on the subject? What motivated me to endeavor a second edition of this book nearly ten years after its original publication was, sadly, that the need had not seemed to have dimmed for this kind of conversation around spiritual and religious trauma but in many ways grown and evolved - to include the impact of religious, specifically in the United States, Christian, nationalism. This symbiosis of some of the more extreme and harmful dimensions of religious contexts aligning with political goals and legislating away rights based on those harmful beliefs, have a growing impact on our social and cultural world. Additionally, while some of the other books written on this subject are specifically from one religious point of view or, on the other end of the spectrum, have taken an agnostic or atheistic approach to the subject, I wanted to create a middle way. Hopefully there are in-roads to this text regardless of the spiritual or religious sources of harm and, for those that wish it, a way to heal that can integrate healthy spiritual expression, not needing to throw away spiritual journeying because of the past harm, similar to the way that having one abusive relationship doesn’t need to close you off to finding a health relationship in the future. 

What was the biggest challenge of writing your book? Even though there are similarities and patterns in the experiences of spiritual and religious harm there is no way to encapsulate in any one book the full breadth and specificity of all experiences or all contexts where harm occurs. Sadly, there are too many spiritual and religious contexts where harm happens and, so, not every one can be explicitly expressed in this book. Additionally, my initial research and sets of interviews from the first edition of the book leaned heavily on those who had experienced harm in conservative Christian spaces. I hope despite this that I have created something that can span across a wide variety of lived experiences.

What was your biggest surprise writing your book? How similar the mechanics and impacts of spiritual and religious trauma are across a very wide scope of spiritual and religious traditions. Ultimately, it is a deeply existential harm that requires existential healing - regardless the spiritual lineage at the source of the harm or the specific leaders/individuals that may have done the harming.. 

What’s something you’d like to do that you haven’t done yet? Write a novel. It was my dream as a child, the first writing I aspired to create, and through the years of writing about trauma, loss and healing that dream fell into the background. I think in this season of the world we need the creative landscapes of imagination and new worlds being visioned, beyond what we think is possible. I think that kind of writing can have a social impact and be a path for healing in its own way, as many novels I have read across my lifetime have inspired me creatively and soulfully. To that end, I am in the process of working on my first novel which I am calling a magical adventure. It is a decolonized Indiana Jones set in the Andes mountains. Wish me luck!

Describe yourself in five words: Creative, visioner, liberationist, indigenized, healer

What’s the best piece of wisdom or advice you’ve ever received? This is a synthesis of some of the most valuable wisdoms I have been given, often in slightly different language and contexts, over many years. First, don’t censor who you are to meet someone else’s narrow expectations of what you need to be. Being ourselves fully and completely is a foundational act of liberation.