Reconstruction of Identity

Content Warning: This episode contains discussions about sexual abuse, including abuse experienced in faith spaces. These topics are explored through the lens of therapy and healing. While we aim to speak with care and compassion, we recognise that these themes may be activating.

Support services are listed below in the show notes, including information about the Royal Commission Redress Scheme and National counselling services.

Reconstruction of Identity: A Conversation with Dr. Josie McSkimming on Clergy Abuse and Recovery

In this compassionate and thought-provoking conversation, psychotherapist, author, and clinical supervisor Dr. Josie McSkimming joins me to explore the complexities of clergy-perpetrated abuse and what it means to recover your identity after betrayal in a faith space.

Drawing on more than 40 years of experience and her personal history within evangelical Christianity, Josie speaks candidly about the longstanding issue of sexual abuse of teenage girls by older male youth leaders and pastors, and how grooming, love-bombing, and spiritual manipulation are used to gain power, sex, and control over young women with little sexual or worldly experience.

We also talk about the professional and personal consequences of leaving church systems, including the isolation and exclusion therapists may face when they no longer receive referrals after stepping away from faith communities.

Together, we explore:

* How clients often arrive in the therapy room with heightened fears

* The importance of stabilisation in the present before any trauma processing, and why these things take time

* The need to honour survival strategies, including compliance and silence, without pathologising victim-survivors

* Why telling one’s story should never be retraumatising, survivors don’t need to share all the details to be believed or understood

* The difficulty of knowing the true prevalence of abuse in faith spaces, given that professional standards units are a relatively recent development, though churches are slowly becoming more accountable

* The importance of checking your bias as a therapist and avoiding the replication of harmful or coercive dynamics

* How survivors may feel pressure to protect Christian counsellors from the truth of their experience, and why Christian therapists must be alert to this

For therapists supporting disclosures of clergy abuse, Josie offers wise, grounded guidance: Prioritise stabilisation. Respect what the client is ready to share. Be more interested in the impacts and how they survived than in what was done to them.

I encourage our listeners to look at survivor response through the lens of compliance and entrapment.

This episode is for survivors, therapists, and anyone seeking to understand better the dynamics of abuse in religious spaces, and how healing can begin with reclaiming your voice, truth, and identity.

Guest Bio

Dr Josie McSkimming is a clinical social worker and psychotherapist with over 40 years’ experience. She is currently in private practice in Sydney, providing counselling to couples and individuals, and clinical supervision.

Her first book, Leaving Christian Fundamentalism and the Reconstruction of Identity (2016, Routledge), describes how power spreads like a chain throughout church communities, shaping and re-shaping identity. Individuals are understood as not only subject to a form of judgment, but also exercise it, with everyone complicit in maintaining the stability of the church structure.

Her most recent book, Gutsy Girls (2025, UQP), is a family memoir of her late sister, the trailblazing queer writer, Dorothy Porter, who was a profound influence on her life. Josie and Dorothy sought very different escapes from their formidable father; Josie fell into (and out of) evangelical Christianity and psychotherapy, while Dot found ‘the Arts’ and sex. With unprecedented access to Porter’s personal diaries and letters, Gutsy Girls is an intimate story of sisterhood, finding creative power and blazing your own trail.

While Josie was once an insider of evangelical Christianity, she has become a loud protesting outsider. Much of her clinical work now focuses on assisting people to understand the effects of religious trauma and religious dogma on their sense of self, while helping them re-construct a preferred identity and a new ethical frame.

w: www.mcskimming.com.au

www.gutsygirls.com.au

National Redress Scheme for Survivors of Ins