When God Feels Unsafe: Trauma, Projection, and Wrestling With the Character of God

In a recent session, a client shared a conversation with a friend who described God as narcissistic.

Not demanding.
Not distant.
Not confusing.

Narcissistic.

It struck me because, beneath the statement itself, I often hear something deeper in these conversations:

fear,
betrayal,
disillusionment,
grief,
mistrust,
or relational wounds being carried into a person’s understanding of God.

For many people, especially those shaped by chronic shame, rigid religion, emotional neglect, abuse, or controlling environments, authority itself can become psychologically loaded.

And understandably so.

When someone grows up around:

• conditional love,

• unpredictability,

• emotional manipulation,

• coercion,

• or chronic criticism,

it can become difficult to separate God from the distorted human representations of authority they experienced early in life.

Sometimes people are not rejecting God as much as they are rejecting the relational experience they were taught to associate with Him.

That distinction matters.

I think many people who wrestle with God’s character are not asking shallow intellectual questions. They are asking deeply relational ones.

Questions like:

• Is love conditional?

• Am I only valuable when obedient?

• Is vulnerability safe?

• Am I fundamentally unwanted?

• Is God disappointed in me?

• Am I loved, or merely managed?

Those are attachment questions as much as theological ones.

I think those questions deserve compassion, not shame.

When I look at the life of Jesus, I do not see someone organized around domination, ego, self-protection, or exploitation. I see radical humility. Nearness. Grief. Mercy. Truth-telling. Compassion. A willingness to move toward suffering rather than away from it.

I see someone who consistently disrupted rigid systems that burdened people while moving gently toward the wounded, the ashamed, the socially rejected, and the exhausted.

That does not erase the difficult theological questions people carry. Nor does it resolve every tension surrounding suffering, judgment, power, or faith.

But I do think it matters that the clearest image of God in Christianity is not coercive power, but self-giving love.

For many trauma survivors, healing spiritually is not simply about “believing harder.” Sometimes it involves slowly untangling:

• God from fear,

• faith from control,

• obedience from shame,

• and spirituality from the survival adaptations people developed inside painful relational environments.

That process can take time.

And I think honest wrestling is often part of faith, not evidence against it.

Some questions are not signs of rebellion.

Sometimes they are signs that a person is trying to find what is real underneath fear, performance, conditioning, and inherited narratives.

And perhaps that search itself matters more than we realize.