ORANGE (CA)
The Good Men Project [Pasadena CA]
December 21, 2025
By Joelle Casteix and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
How does Joelle Casteix explain the gendered and spiritual trauma of Catholic clergy abuse and the pathways from victimhood to survivor-led advocacy and recovery?
Joelle Casteix is a leading advocate for survivors of child sexual abuse in faith-based and institutional settings. A survivor of Catholic clergy abuse herself, she has spent decades exposing cover-ups, supporting victims, and explaining the unique spiritual and psychological harms of abuse perpetrated by religious authority figures. Drawing on both personal experience and research, she discusses “soul murder,” complex shame, and long-delayed disclosure, especially among women in patriarchal religious systems. Through writing, public speaking, litigation support, and peer support, Casteix works to transform victimization into agency, encouraging survivors to seek validation, redefine themselves, and, where possible, become powerful advocates for change.
In this interview, Scott Douglas Jacobsen speaks with Joelle Casteix about the gendered and spiritual dimensions of clergy abuse in Christian and especially Catholic contexts. Casteix explains how girls often internalize profound shame, seeing themselves as “dirty” before God, while boys may struggle with confusion about sexuality and masculinity. She describes “soul murder,” where religious authority turns abuse into a deep spiritual wound. The discussion traces pathways from victim to survivor and advocate, emphasizing the pivotal moment of being believed. Casteix underscores non-linear recovery, the dangers of minimization, and the urgent need for accountability in hierarchical religious institutions.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Based on the preliminary data we do have and on broader work outside of religious institutions involving similar crimes—though without the added layer of supernatural authority claimed within the community—it is clearly a gendered issue. It appears in both prevalence and frequency, as well as in the kinds of responses we see. Many forms of emotional dysregulation, whether intermittent or more chronic, follow similar patterns. When it comes to women who have been subjected to this type of abuse from a religious figure of authority within a Christian community, what would you argue are the different patterns or “flavours of trauma response a person can have to that experience?
Joelle Casteix: When we talk about responses to trauma, we can begin at the moment of the crime. If you have a young girl who does not understand or know her sexuality, who has not been taught the facts of life, who does not understand what is happening, we often find that survivors of abuse come to see themselves as contaminated or “dirty.”
They know something is wrong, but they cannot always put a finger on it or explain it. For boys, research and clinical reports often describe a painful internal conflict: it may have felt physically pleasurable in some ways, but they feel ashamed, guilty, or “dirty.” For girls, there is more often significant physical pain involved, and it is typically not experienced as pleasurable. From there, the trauma builds.
You have a person in a religious authority role manipulating and coercing a child—either through direct physical coercion or psychological manipulation—getting the child to do things the child instinctively feels are wrong or “dirty.” The abuser might call it a game or give it another name, but the child senses that something is wrong. After the event ends—and in many cases, it does not end quickly; the abuse can be repeated over time—the trauma unfolds. For girls, shame often develops in a particularly intense way.
It is not only “Something bad happened to me,” but also “I am a dirty, vile, disgusting, reviled human being in God’s eyes.” Once they are exposed to religious teachings—especially within certain strands of Christianity and Catholicism—about sexuality, purity, and sin, and what they are taught in religious education, that feeling of shame can compound the trauma. Research suggests that this added spiritual and moral layer of shame and fear of divine judgment can intensify and prolong the impact of the abuse in ways that may differ from, and in some cases exceed, patterns seen in many non-religious or strictly familial abuse contexts.
The people who study this, including theologians, call it “soul murder” because it is so much deeper and more intrinsic to a child’s spirituality than abuse by, say, a babysitter or a family member. There is that spiritual layer. You will find that when that layering is doubled—let us say someone is in a Mormon community and the abuser is a father—that “soul murder” is compounded dramatically.
How that trauma manifests for many girls, based on studies, shows a tendency toward inward expression: self-harming behaviours, alcoholism, sexual promiscuity, and activities aimed at dulling the pain or reclaiming a sense of power. You generally do not see the same violence and aggression that often appears in male survivors. Because boys are not conditioned to talk about their feelings, their trauma frequently expresses itself in action.
So the trauma compounds. As these women grow up within their faith communities—something I saw firsthand with survivors who were extraordinarily angry with me when I first came forward in 2003—I noticed that they were often the most devout. Not necessarily the most pious in belief in God, but in their faith in Catholicism and the institution of the Church. They were angry at me because they believed I was harming the Church. I tried to explain that exposing wrongdoing within the Church is not the same as harming the Church; those are two very different things.
Five, ten, fifteen years later, many of the people who were so angry with me came back and said, “Actually, I am a survivor.” They told me they had been angry because they were angry at themselves. They had internalized so much shame that they thought the Catholic Church was the only thing that could save them, and I was shining a light on something they depended on spiritually. We find that many female survivors embrace the faith intensely. They do not see themselves as survivors.
I met a group of women during a major scandal in the Buffalo Diocese—still being litigated—where a whistleblower exposed extensive cover-ups of abuse. Investigators found files hidden in a broom closet, right next to a vacuum cleaner. When survivors came forward, several adult women—older than I was at the time, in their 50s and 60s—emerged as a group. They had been together as a support network because they were part of a prayer group seeking to save themselves and mend their souls. They told me, “We want to come forward and talk about this, but we’re really not…”
“We’re not victims of abuse. We’re not survivors of abuse.” I asked them what made them say that. They told me, “We were 13, 14, 15-year-old girls. We were promiscuous, we didn’t say no, we were flirtatious. So it’s not abuse. But we know that if it happened to us, it might have happened to younger girls or boys.” I spoke to these women for years, and I do not think I was ever able to crack that veneer—help them see that what happened to them was abuse. There was a massive power differential. They were minors. This was a man of God. It was a crime. All of those things matter. I find it very common that female survivors within the Catholic faith do not see themselves as survivors because of the dichotomy we discussed earlier: the Virgin–Whore divide, the Mother Mary ideal.
That becomes a very complex trauma because these women go on to have families, and many of them have daughters. We see that disclosure takes a long time for many survivors. One of the most common triggering mechanisms is when survivors have children who reach the age the survivor was when they were abused. They see their 13, 14, or 15-year-old daughter and think, “This kid is not causing this. This kid is not asking for it.” All of the survivor’s trauma resurfaces. They question themselves: “Have I been wrong all these years? Is the Church wrong?” That creates a profound layer of compounded trauma for many female survivors.
In talking about this, I do not want to minimize the experience of male survivors. It is not that one is worse; it is that they are very distinct. Some elements are similar, but many are different because the dynamics and burdens differ, as does the shame. Within the Catholic Church, male survivors often face an additional trauma: “Does this make me gay? Did the priest make me gay?” That is an agonizing thought process for a boy, especially when he is developing his own sexuality—something he should be discovering on his own terms, not forced upon him by an adult. Abuse does not define a person’s sexuality; the individual defines it. But when that boundary is violated, the confusion is immense and highly traumatic. We do not see that particular pattern as often with girls because female-on-female abuse by adult women is comparatively rare.
It is tough for many women. I think the Me Too movement was a reckoning for a large number of female survivors in the Church, because they saw adult women come forward and say it happened to them, and society acknowledged that non-consensual sex and power differentials are abuse that can be criminal. When the victim is a child, it is always criminal. That recognition has empowered many women to come forward and confront what happened to them. However, I still think we have a long way to go in any hierarchical religion—Mormonism, Catholicism, evangelical Christianity, Orthodox Christianity—any system where men alone hold the primary positions of power.
Jacobsen: Let us flip the usual script. People have been victimized, but they do not have to remain victims. They can be survivors. They can be advocates. They can be drivers of change. What are the pathways people can take—from recognizing what happened to them, acknowledging that fact, integrating it into their narrative honestly, regardless of whether the Church provides accountability, and moving into categories such as survivor, thriver, advocate, and so on?
Casteix: First, let us talk about the term “victim.” “Victim” means something happened to you: I was a victim of a stabbing. I was a victim of child sexual abuse. I was the victim of a dog bite. After that event, how you define yourself—whether as a survivor, a thriver, or an advocate—is the role you choose to take afterward. None of us decides to be a victim; something happened to us. What we do afterward defines who we are moving forward.
We have found that the number one step people take in moving from “something happened to me” to “I am going to survive and grow through this” is not necessarily acknowledging privately that something bad happened, but telling someone else about it. Survivors can say to themselves what happened over and over, but many do not believe themselves. It is not until a third party—often someone they do not know—says, “What happened to you was wrong. It was not your fault. I believe you,” that something shifts. Being believed is enormous. Many survivors are not believed at all. Hearing “It was criminal” and “There are people who can support you” can be transformative.
In my case, the first person who told me that what happened to me was wrong, that it was abuse, that it was a crime, that it was not my fault, and that he believed me was an attorney. It was not my parents. It was not my friends. I was not speaking with him to open a legal case; I thought I only had information that might help others. I did not know I was a survivor. I thought I had asked for it. The attorney had experience in these cases and recognized immediately what had happened. It is a sad reality that the first person to affirm that truth for me was not someone close to me. I am grateful, but ideally, that affirmation should come from family and peers. It often does not.
If you speak to survivors, you will hear that the turning point—what moves people from “something bad happened to me”to “I survived this, and I can grow through it”—is receiving that validating response from another person: “I believe you. It was wrong. It was not your fault.” That is usually the moment people shift into the survivorship phase.
“Thriver” is not a term I use personally. It does not resonate with me, though there is nothing wrong with it. For me, the most significant healing action I could take was to take positive forward action to prevent this from happening to anyone else. That is why I became an advocate, and that is why many others do as well. Groups like SNAP exist because survivors reach that point where they think, “I can actually do something about this.” When you are a victim, you cannot do anything; it simply happens to you. Advocacy becomes the logical next step—an act of reclaiming agency.
When you are a survivor and take the next step into advocacy, there are countless things you can do to move forward and help ensure that what happened to you does not happen to another child. It does not mean you need to hold press conferences the way I did for years, or stand in front of a church with a sign. You can write a letter. You can talk to other survivors. You can be supportive. There are a million ways to be an advocate. You can send a contribution to SNAP or to other advocacy organizations. Those are meaningful steps.
In my own case, because I am very type A, I had to go in with a sledgehammer, so to speak. I knew what happened to me, but they also did it to my friends, to my peers, to my sister’s friends and peers. They did it for years and years. That weighed heavily on me. I needed to take an active step to stop it. That became the most essential part of my healing. It allowed me to go to bed at night. And yes, some of that is tied to guilt and shame—thinking, “If I am making it better, I am a better person.” I do not want anyone to think that way, because that is how shame works. Every person is wonderful and whole exactly as they are, no matter what happened to them. You do not need to do anything to become worthy. You can be a survivor or a thriver simply by being yourself. But for me, taking action was necessary.
There is also something powerful about taking each day as a promise—looking toward the positive things ahead that day or the next, maintaining forward momentum. That became part of my path forward.
This applies not only to survivor communities but to every community. If you are not moving forward, you stagnate. It is like physical activity: if you stop working out, you lose bone density and muscle tone; if you stop walking as an older adult, deterioration begins. Every day you need to ask, “What can I do to fill my heart today?” That might mean supporting an organization, speaking publicly, meditating, supporting another survivor, or taking an extra-long nap because that is what you need. It is about recognizing that each day is a chance to create meaningful change in the world—and that change begins in your own heart.
I cannot go out and tell people not to abuse children if I am not taking care of myself. If I allow myself to be sacrificed in the process, I am not helping others. That is why self-care is essential, and why taking things day by day matters. My most significant contribution to the movement, I think, is being able to make it through intact—keeping my family together and raising a son who is, hopefully, a reasonably decent human being. All of that is part of the movement, too.
There are situations where a person will not recover. There are certain types of abuse—at least from what I have seen—so extreme and so psychologically damaging that the impact stays with them for life. There is a difference between intent and impact. In conversation, I might say, “I do not like your glasses,” but what you hear is, “I am a horrible person.”Abuse works that way. This is what makes child sexual abuse—especially abuse by religious figures—so pernicious and so painful: the violation of trust is profound. Sometimes the abuse itself is not physically violent. All abuse is awful, but we talk about a continuum. Even the smallest amount of abuse can have a devastating effect on a survivor.
Many survivors do not make it through. Every year, we lose many to alcoholism, self-harm, suicide, drug abuse, and violence. You cannot measure the harm by the intensity of the act, but by the impact on the survivor. Here is an example: in cases of stranger abduction and sexual assault, research shows that the recovery prospects are sometimes better because the child was taken off the street—they had no relationship with the offender and no sense of self-blame. There was truly nothing they could have done. The event is traumatic, but the pathway to healing can be more direct than for a child who was manipulated into long-term abuse by someone in a position of authority who is also a religious figure.
In those cases, the physical severity of the stranger assault may be far worse, but the psychological impact on the child abused by a priest, bishop, or similar authority can be far more damaging because of the manipulation, the spiritual betrayal, and the emotional toll.
Jacobsen: What is the question that you do hear asked—or that you do not hear asked correctly—about clergy abuse, its impacts, causes, intentions, institutional responsibility, or anything in that realm?
Casteix: To be fair, things have improved a great deal over the past twenty years. People have grown in their awareness and their understanding of the ramifications and long-term effects of this kind of abuse. I think what people still tend not to understand is that the worst abuse a survivor can go through is their own. You will hear people say, “What happened to you wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t like what happened to so-and-so.” But I am not so-and-so. They are usually trying to make you feel better, but what it actually does is create a hierarchy of abuse within the survivor community. That is not easy. You can never minimize…
When we talk about impact, you can never minimize it. You will hear people—naysayers, critics—especially when a case is being litigated, say, “It wasn’t that bad. It was only one instance.” Well, how many times do you have to be murdered for the crime to take effect? Once. As human beings, we tend to minimize harm because we do not want to face the horrible, uncomfortable truth of many situations. Minimization is one of the hardest things survivors deal with.
For female survivors who already carry significant shame, that minimization reinforces the burden. For male survivors, minimization often comes from other men who do not understand and say things like, “Well, I would have fought him off”or “I would have done this or that.” They do not understand the dynamic, and that response is deeply shaming and belittling for male survivors. That is one reason many male survivors do not talk. Once you get them talking, they usually open up—but getting them to start is the hardest part.
Jacobsen: What’s an excellent quote on recovery?
Casteix: I do not want to take full credit for this because I know I did not come up with it, but recovery is not a straight line upward. Recovery has peaks and valleys. Recovery is a process and a dynamic that grows with you. Who I am now, in my recovery process as a 55-year-old mother of a 19-year-old and a wife, is very different from who I was in my recovery when I was a 35-year-old brand-new mother. That carried a whole new realm of shame because my abuse involved pregnancy and abortion. That created its own layer of trauma.
Now my recovery is different again because of my father. He and I have always had a good relationship, but when it came to the abuse, he blamed me a lot. He is 87 now and declining, and he likes to talk about the abuse frequently. What he remembers is often not what happened, and sometimes it is hurtful. That changes the recovery process. I have to recognize that he is 87, and this happened almost forty years ago.
This has been half his life, and he is still dealing with it as a parent. That gives my recovery a whole new dimension. As I watch my son grow into a man, I think about how I have raised him to understand boundaries and all the things I never understood at his age—which he does beautifully. That is another part of the recovery process. I have had to learn to let go. There is nothing more complicated, as a survivor of abuse, than saying goodbye to your child as they drive away. It kills me. I want to keep him here forever.
Recovery is a changing, dynamic process that can grow with you and be as beautiful and interesting as life itself. Most people would not call recovery beautiful, but I think it can be, because it has allowed—forced—me to see much more of the world than I ever would have seen otherwise, and to encounter people in all their different shapes and experiences. Many people think recovery is linear: you go from point A to point B, and one day you wake up and say, “I’m all better.”No. But if you embrace it as a dynamic process that will grow and mature with you, it can become a fantastic part of who you are. It is not something that drags you down; it is something that lifts you.
Jacobsen: Thank you very much for your time today. I appreciate it.
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-