When Her Well Wasn’t Well for Me
Part Three of My Lived Experience
My Experience at a Christian Crisis Center: When a Place That Claimed to Restore Voices Became Uncomfortable With Mine
When a Safe Place Became Unsafe
Twenty years after leaving an abusive relationship, I found myself inside another system that claimed to understand safety, trauma, voice, and healing. The setting, language, and people were different, but something in the pattern felt familiar. At the time, I was trying to rebuild my relationship with Christianity, which had never been simple for me. I had spent years wrestling with religious trauma, hypocrisy, exclusion, judgment, and the pressure to become the right kind of Christian in order to belong. I had watched people be pushed aside when they did not fit someone else’s idea of faithfulness, and I had questioned teachings that seemed more concerned with obedience than truth. Still, part of me wanted to believe there might be a healthier way to reconnect. I was not looking for someone to tell me what to believe; I was trying to determine what I believed for myself.
At the same time, I wanted to work in mental health peer support and gain experience serving survivors of domestic violence. One day, I searched online for organizations near me, and Her Well Center appeared. At that point in my life, finding it felt meaningful because it seemed to bring together my lived experience, my interest in peer support, my desire to support survivors, and my attempt to rebuild spiritually. I applied to volunteer, attended orientation, met people, became involved with the organization, and was invited to Bible study.
Before becoming more involved, I told them about my religious history. I explained that Christianity had been connected to conflict and harm for me, discussed exclusion, hypocrisy, pressure to perform belief, and the ways religious spaces had contributed to my questioning whether I was acceptable. I made it clear that I was uncertain, that I was approaching spirituality on my own terms, and that I did not want to be forced into anything. I was assured that I would not be pressured, and I was also told that because the organization was a nonprofit, Christianity could not simply be imposed on me. That assurance mattered because I did not enter the situation without disclosing my history. I told them what I was carrying, and I continued because I believed what I had been told about the space I was entering.
How I Became an Employee
Through Bible study and volunteer work, I met the founder and director. She appeared to appreciate my directness, energy, and willingness to engage, and she encouraged me to become more involved and interview for an advocate position. I also completed victim-advocacy training through the organization. When a job became available, I applied, but several weeks passed without anyone contacting me, so I assumed I had not been selected or did not meet whatever qualifications they were seeking.
During Bible study, the director later asked why I had not applied. I told her I had submitted an application approximately four weeks earlier, and she appeared surprised and questioned why no one had contacted me. After that conversation, the hiring process moved quickly and I was brought onto the staff. The person who became my supervisor did not appear to have been the person pushing for me to join the organization, and she later commented that she understood why the director liked me because the director and I were supposedly alike. At the time, I interpreted the director’s interest as evidence that she recognized something valuable in me. Looking back, I also understand that I entered the position partly because someone higher in the organization had strongly supported my hiring, which may have contributed to some of the dynamics that followed.
The Feeling I Did Not Trust
I had doubts almost immediately. Something felt wrong to me, although I could not fully explain what I was noticing. At the time, I did not yet know I was autistic or had ADHD. I knew that I processed people, communication, systems, and inconsistencies differently, but I did not have the language I have now for understanding those differences. Because I had spent much of my life second-guessing myself, I assumed the discomfort was mine to correct rather than information worth examining.
I questioned whether I was overreacting, being difficult, misreading the situation, or somehow creating the problem myself. That pattern was already familiar to me. It had kept me in harmful environments before because I had learned to treat my own discomfort as evidence against myself. Instead of asking what my unease might be telling me about the environment, I asked what was wrong with me for feeling it. The consequences of that habit did not end with this experience. I am still affected by the way this situation reinforced questions about whether I can trust what I notice, particularly when the people or institutions around me insist that what I am experiencing is not what I believe it to be.
What I Valued and What Concerned Me
There were parts of the work I genuinely valued. I cared about survivors and wanted experience that would help me better understand advocacy, crisis work, and the realities people face after violence. I was not looking for reasons to dislike the organization, and my later concerns do not erase the parts of the experience that mattered to me. At the same time, I began observing practices and dynamics that concerned me. The organization frequently spoke about teamwork, but from my perspective there was a noticeable division between leadership and the rest of the staff. Although the staff was relatively small, several people appeared to function as a leadership group while advocates and case-management staff occupied a different level of authority.
I also experienced decision-making as heavily centralized. Staff members seemed to have limited freedom to act without checking with the director, and some questions were placed on a spreadsheet to wait for her review, including matters that I understood to involve clients or CPS and that sometimes felt time-sensitive. I found that structure difficult because crisis work requires both appropriate supervision and enough clarity about authority for people to respond responsibly when situations cannot simply wait. My concern was not that staff should act without accountability. It was that accountability and autonomy both matter, particularly when people are working with individuals whose circumstances may require timely decisions.
I raised concerns about communication and said that I believed leadership needed to examine its own functioning before asking the entire staff to participate in team-building exercises. I did not intend that as a personal attack. From my perspective, I was responding to confusion, delayed communication, unequal treatment, and an environment where people appeared reluctant to act without approval. What I was trying to address as a structural problem was not received that way, and the more directly I spoke about what I was observing, the more tension developed around my communication.
Trying to Leave
My communication with my supervisor was one of the areas where tension became increasingly visible. I often felt that ordinary, task-focused statements were received as personal criticism or that my directness caused emotional reactions I had not intended. I did not yet understand how autism, ADHD, masking, trauma, and years of being misunderstood were interacting with those moments. I only knew that I seemed unable to speak plainly without eventually being told that the way I communicated was a problem.
Because I did not believe the situation was working, I told the director more than once that I did not think I was a good fit and attempted to leave. Each time, I was discouraged from doing so and told to remain. That became significant to me later when my communication was described as an ongoing problem that contributed to the decision to terminate my employment. From where I stood, I had already recognized that something was not working and had offered to remove myself from the environment. Leadership had chosen to keep me there, which made the later explanation difficult for me to reconcile with what I had experienced while I was still employed.
The Team-Building Trip
Eventually, we were told we would attend a team-building trip in Galveston. I expected the trip to address communication, trust, roles, conflict, or practical staff functioning, and I was prepared to participate in that kind of work. Instead, part of the experience involved material about how to be Christian. Given what I had already disclosed about my religious history and the assurances I believed I had received, the situation affected me differently than it might have affected someone without that history.
I had already explained that religious pressure had been harmful to me. I had been told that I would not be forced, had previously attempted to leave the job, and had even offered to remain behind and answer phones rather than attend the trip. I was nevertheless expected to participate. Sitting in that room, I felt trapped. The message being presented included the idea that Jesus did not force himself on people, yet I was experiencing what felt to me like mandatory religious instruction in a workplace after having clearly explained that religious coercion was part of my history. The contradiction became unbearable for me. I cried, became angry, raised my voice, and walked out, reminding them that I had already shared this history and did not believe I should have been placed in that situation.
What I needed in that moment was not to be treated as though I had suddenly become a client simply because I was distressed. I needed someone to recognize that I had disclosed a boundary and that, from my perspective, the organization had crossed it. Instead, a coworker moved into victim-advocate mode and attempted to guide me through a grounding exercise. I told her not to advocate me. I was not rejecting her as a person or denying that I was overwhelmed. I was trying to communicate that I did not want my reaction transformed into a problem to be managed while the circumstances contributing to that reaction remained unexamined. I was a coworker responding to a situation I had already tried to prevent.
What Came Out
I eventually returned to the room, and much of what I had been holding back came out with me. I spoke about leadership, communication, limited staff autonomy, and the way employees appeared to wait for permission before acting. I also raised concerns about the way some clients were discussed when they were not present. I had heard comments that reduced people to statements such as, “That is just how she is,” and those comments bothered me because people in crisis are already vulnerable to being labeled, dismissed, and treated as though their behavior is the entire story.
When a person is reduced to a personality judgment, it becomes easier to stop asking what the behavior may mean, what happened to the person, what the person is trying to communicate, or whether something within the environment itself is contributing to the conflict. I knew what it felt like to become “That is just her.” I knew what it was like to have people decide that my reaction was the problem without examining the circumstances surrounding it, and that history influenced the way I heard people being discussed. During the retreat I also challenged comments that I experienced as racially insensitive and inappropriate.
By that point, I was overwhelmed. I was crying, angry, and speaking directly without the amount of monitoring and softening I normally used to make my communication easier for other people to receive. I can acknowledge that my delivery may have been difficult to hear and that being distressed does not automatically make every word or reaction beyond examination. At the same time, I do not believe acknowledging my delivery requires me to withdraw the substance of every concern I raised. Both things can be true: I was emotionally overwhelmed, and I was also trying to communicate concerns I believed were real.
How the Room Responded
After everything came out, the room did not immediately turn against me. People hugged me. One coworker told me she had been praying for me to release what I had been holding, and the director acknowledged that I was not the only person who had not wanted to attend. Her grandmother held my hand, told me she loved me, asked for my address, and said she wanted to pray for me. The atmosphere shifted, and I experienced the remainder of the moment as though what had happened was being interpreted as something meaningful and even healing.
By the end of the gathering, people were dancing and laughing, and I left believing that although the day had been messy and emotionally difficult, something honest had finally been said. I thought perhaps the organization had heard me and that what had happened might create an opportunity to address some of the issues that had been sitting beneath the surface. The next day, I was fired.
The Explanation I Was Given
The termination was presented in formal workplace language. I was still within the introductory period of employment, and I was told there had been repeated concerns about my communication. I was also told that the director and leadership team had decided that I made them uncomfortable and that they no longer wanted me employed there.
That explanation did not fit easily with the sequence of events as I had experienced them. I had previously raised concerns about whether I was a good fit, attempted to leave, and been persuaded to remain. I had not understood that my employment was in immediate danger. Then, after objecting to a religious activity I had tried not to attend, challenging leadership practices, and naming concerns about how I experienced clients being discussed, I was terminated the following day.
I cannot know every private conversation, motive, or factor that went into that decision, and I do not claim to. I can only describe the sequence I experienced and what it meant to me. My directness had initially been something leadership appeared to appreciate. My lived experience and personal story had also been welcomed in an organization whose work centered survivors. During the retreat, even my distress appeared for a time to be interpreted through the organization’s spiritual language as a meaningful release. What I experienced afterward was that when my voice became openly critical of leadership, control, communication, and contradictions I believed I was seeing, that same voice was no longer welcome in the organization.
The Distance Between Language and Practice
The experience forced me to think much more seriously about the distance that can exist between the language an organization uses and the way people experience that organization internally. Words such as compassion, integrity, safety, empowerment, restoration, healing, and voice carry weight, particularly when they are being used by organizations that serve people who have already experienced abuse, coercion, trauma, or loss of control. Those words are not simply decoration. They tell vulnerable people something about what they should be able to expect.
My experience left me asking questions about what happens when stated values encounter disagreement. An organization can speak about voice, but the deeper test is what happens when someone uses that voice to say something leadership does not want to hear. It can speak about empowerment, but empowerment becomes more difficult to evaluate when power remains tightly controlled. It can describe itself as trauma-informed, but that description has to be reflected in how disclosed trauma is handled when it becomes inconvenient rather than only when it fits easily into the organization’s story.
The same is true of faith. Christian language does not automatically guarantee loving behavior, just as trauma-informed language does not automatically guarantee that every person will experience a setting as safe. The harder questions appear when someone disagrees, refuses a particular interpretation, names a contradiction, questions authority, or responds in a way that is uncomfortable. That is where values stop being abstract language and become something people can actually experience.
What the Experience Changed — and What It Did Not Resolve
Being fired hurt then, and parts of the experience still affect me now. I had entered the organization believing it might become part of rebuilding my professional life, reconnecting with spirituality, and moving toward work supporting survivors. I invested time, trust, effort, vulnerability, and hope in that possibility. Losing the position was not only about employment. It became connected to older questions about whether speaking honestly makes me unsafe, whether belonging depends on making myself easier to manage, whether I can trust my perception when someone with more authority disagrees with it, and whether institutions that talk about empowerment will still make room for a person whose voice becomes inconvenient.
Distance from the organization has given me perspective, but distance has not erased the impact. I can still recognize ways the experience affects how I approach organizations, leadership, workplace dynamics, religious spaces, authority, trust, and my own communication. Situations involving power, control, contradiction, or being told that my perception is wrong can touch something that did not begin at Her Well but was reinforced there. I can understand more now about autism, ADHD, trauma, masking, communication, and the way my nervous system responds without pretending that understanding has made the experience disappear.
The experience also changed the kind of work I want to create. It clarified why autonomy matters so deeply to me and why I do not want support to become another form of managing people into acceptability. I do not want to create spaces where someone must become compliant in order to be considered healed, where spirituality overrides consent, or where empowerment means having a voice only until that voice becomes difficult to hear. I want people to retain authority over their own lives. I want support to mean walking beside someone without quietly taking ownership of their choices, and I want organizations that speak about voice to be willing to examine what happens when the voice speaking is not saying what they expected.
I can hold that clarity without turning what happened into something I am grateful for or pretending that the pain was necessary in order for me to learn. Her Well did not have to hurt me for me to eventually know what kind of work I wanted to build, and I do not need to turn the experience into a gift in order to make meaning from it. What happened affected me then, and it continues to affect me now, even as I understand it differently and make different choices because of what I learned. The most important change is not that I walked away untouched or completely healed from the experience. It is that I am becoming less willing to respond to discomfort by immediately abandoning my own perception. I am still working through what happened, still recognizing what it changed in me, and still learning how to trust myself when an environment tells me that what I see, feel, or question is the problem. That work is not finished, and I do not need to pretend that it is.
