Shunning Is Relational Violence
“Shunning” - the word itself is too quiet for what it describes.
Shunning is not simply being ignored, it’s not a falling out between people who grew apart, and it’s not even the ordinary painful experience of a friendship ending. Shunning is the organised, deliberate, and sustained withdrawal of relational existence from a person, carried out by a community acting in concert, usually under the direction of an authority structure that has determined the shunned person’s continued recognition would threaten the group’s cohesion or control.
It is, in other words, a coordinated act, and coordinated acts that cause harm have a name.
The reluctance to call shunning what it is runs deep, because it happens inside religious communities, and because it’s framed, always, as a spiritual act rather than a social one. It’s framed as obedience, love, and the painful but necessary expression of faithfulness to God, to the community, and to the truth. The framing does a great deal of work to insulate the practice from scrutiny, because how do you hold a community accountable for a form of harm that its members experience as righteousness?
You start by naming it accurately. Shunning is relational violence.
What Shunning Actually Is
To understand shunning as violence we need to understand what it takes from the person it’s directed at.
Shunning removes recognition. In communities where shunning is practised, the person who has been shunned is treated as though they don’t exist.
Former friends look through them in public.
Family members don’t return calls.
People who shared meals, prayers, milestones, and decades of intimate life together act as though the shunned person has ceased to be a person worth acknowledging.
This isn’t metaphorical erasure. It’s literal, daily, enacted erasure.
Shunning removes belonging. Human beings are, at the most fundamental level, social creatures whose nervous systems developed in the context of group membership. Belonging isn’t a preference or a luxury, it’s a biological need. Research across decades and disciplines has established that social belonging functions, neurobiologically, the same way physical safety does. Its absence registers as threat. Its removal registers as danger. Shunning doesn’t just hurt feelings, it removes something the human nervous system treats as essential to survival.
Shunning removes history. The people who knew you, who were present for the significant events of your life, who carry the shared memories that constitute your sense of continuity as a person, are no longer accessible. Your history doesn’t just become painful, it becomes inaccessible, held hostage by a community that has decided you’re no longer real to them.
And critically, shunning doesn’t happen once. It’s not a single event that can be grieved and integrated, it happens continuously, for as long as the shunned person remains in proximity to anyone from the group, and sometimes long after they’ve moved away.
Every unreturned call is shunning.
Every family event they’re excluded from is shunning.
Every passing encounter where they’re looked through rather than at is shunning.
The violence is not one act, it’s a sustained campaign.
The Neurobiology of Social Rejection
The language of “hurt feelings” has historically made it easier to dismiss the harm of social rejection as something less serious than physical harm. The research tells a different story.
Naomi Eisenberger’s and colleagues (2003) neuroimaging studies at UCLA produced findings that were, at the time of publication, genuinely surprising to many people outside the field: social pain and physical pain activate overlapping neural systems. The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, a region associated with the distress component of physical pain, shows increased activity in response to social exclusion. The experience of being rejected, excluded, or ostracised is not a metaphorical pain. It registers in the brain in ways that are meaningfully similar to the registration of physical injury.
This has significant implications for how we understand shunning. When someone is shunned by their entire community, they’re not experiencing hurt feelings in the colloquial sense. They’re experiencing something their nervous system processes as a physical threat, because for most of human evolutionary history, exclusion from the group was a death sentence. The nervous system didn’t develop a separate, softer response for social exclusion because social exclusion wasn’t survivable. The response to it needed to be as urgent as the response to physical danger.
Kipling Williams’ and colleagues (2000) research on ostracism, developed through his Cyberball paradigm and subsequent studies, extended this understanding considerably. They found that even brief, trivial, and obviously meaningless social exclusion, being left out of a ball-tossing game by strangers who the participant knew were computer-generated, produced measurable increases in distress, decreases in feelings of belonging and meaningful existence, and a reduction in the sense of having control over one’s environment. These effects emerged within minutes and persisted beyond the exclusion itself.
What Williams et al. was measuring was the mildest possible version of social exclusion. It was momentary, it was by strangers, and it was objectively trivial. If even that registers as significant threat to the nervous system, what does sustained, organised, intimate ostracism by an entire community of people who were once the centre of your world do?
The research on chronic social rejection gives us some sense of the answer. Chronic social exclusion is associated with elevated cortisol, disrupted sleep, impaired immune function, increased inflammatory markers, depression, anxiety, and in severe cases, suicidal ideation. The body responds to sustained relational threat the way it responds to any other chronic stressor: by mounting a physiological response that, over time, costs it deeply.
Shunning doesn’t just hurt people emotionally, it makes them physically unwell, and when it’s organised, sustained, and total, the physiological burden is correspondingly severe.
Shunning as Coercive Control
Evan Stark’s (2007) coercive control framework, which I’ve applied in previous posts to congregational settings, is directly applicable to shunning as well. One of the defining features of coercive control is that it doesn’t need to deploy physical force to achieve dominance. It achieves dominance by controlling the conditions of the target’s relational existence, by making belonging conditional on compliance and withdrawal the consequence of dissent.
Shunning is the enforcement mechanism of relational coercive control at the community level. It’s the answer to the question: what happens to people who leave or deviate? And its existence, as a known and practiced consequence, shapes the behaviour of every person who remains inside the group, not just the people it’s actually deployed against.
This is why shunning functions as a control tactic even when it’s not actively being used. Every member of a group that practises shunning knows what happens to people who step out of line. They’ve seen it. They’ve been required to participate in it. The knowledge that this is what awaits them if they question, leave, or deviate is a powerful behavioural constraint that doesn’t need to be repeatedly articulated because it’s embedded in the group’s culture as established fact.
When we understand shunning this way, as a coercive control tactic rather than a spiritual practice, its function becomes clear. It’s not primarily about the person being shunned, it’s about the people watching. It’s about maintaining the conditions under which dissent feels too costly to be worth it. The shunned person is, in a very real sense, being made an example of for the benefit of everyone who remains.
The Specific Harm of Religiously Mandated Shunning
Not all shunning is religiously mandated, but the form that causes the most extensive and long-lasting harm tends to be, and the religious dimension amplifies the impact.
When shunning is mandated by a religious authority as an expression of God’s will, the person being shunned doesn’t only lose their community, they lose the framework that gave their suffering meaning. Inside the religious system, suffering could be understood as sanctified, as purposeful, as held by a God who saw it and cared about it. Outside the system, particularly when the exit has been involuntary or coerced, that framework is no longer available.
They also lose access to the people who loved them, while being told by those same people that the withdrawal of love is itself an act of love. This is a form of relational contradiction that the mind struggles to integrate.
You’re being harmed by people who are telling you the harm is care.
You’re being erased by people who are telling you the erasure is for your benefit.
The cognitive and emotional dissonance generated by this contradiction is profound and persistent.
For people who were born into communities that practise shunning, there’s an additional layer of harm that’s worth naming separately. They didn’t choose the community from which they’re being excluded, and they didn’t consent to the belief system that made their exclusion possible. They grew up inside a world that formed them, that shaped their attachment patterns and their sense of what belonging means and what they’re worth, and that world has now rejected them for becoming something it made them unable not to become. The existential cruelty of that is immense.
The Ongoing Nature of the Trauma
I’ve written before on this blog about shunning as ongoing trauma rather than a discrete event. It’s worth returning to that point here, because I think it’s the thing most commonly missed by people who haven’t experienced it.
Trauma, as we understand it clinically, involves an event or series of events that overwhelms the nervous system’s capacity to integrate and respond. The recovery from trauma involves the gradual integration of that experience, the processing of the nervous system’s response, and the eventual development of a coherent narrative that locates the experience in the past even while acknowledging its ongoing effects.
Shunning resists this integration because the trauma isn’t in the past, it’s continuous.
Every time a shunned person tries to make contact with a family member and is ignored, that’s a new wound.
Every time they attend a family event and are looked through by people who once loved them, that’s a new wound.
Every significant life moment, a birth, a graduation, a loss, a marriage, that passes without acknowledgment from the people who should be celebrating or grieving it with them, is a new wound.
You cannot integrate an experience that hasn’t ended or grieve a loss that keeps happening. The clinical consequence of this is that shunning tends to produce a trauma response that’s more similar to complex PTSD than to the responses associated with discrete traumatic events. It involves not a single overwhelm but a sustained condition of relational threat that shapes nervous system functioning, attachment patterns, identity, and capacity for trust over the long term.
This is why the timeline of “getting over” shunning doesn’t follow anything like the trajectory people outside it expect. You’re not getting over a thing that happened, you’re living alongside a thing that keeps happening, and simultaneously trying to build a life in which you have enough relational safety and enough internal resource to metabolise each new instance of it as it arrives.
That is an enormous, exhausting, never-finished task.
What Shunning Does to Identity
There’s a dimension of shunning’s harm that sits beyond the neurobiological, and it operates at the level of identity.
We understand who we are, in significant part, through the mirror of other people’s recognition of us. From infancy, our sense of self is constituted through being seen, being responded to, being held in another person’s regard.
Shunning is the organised withdrawal of that recognition. It’s a community telling a person, through coordinated action rather than words: you are not real to us anymore. You don’t exist in a way that requires our acknowledgment, and because human identity is constituted through relational recognition, this withdrawal has consequences that go beyond the emotional pain of rejection.
It attacks selfhood.
Survivors of sustained shunning often describe a specific and distinctive experience: the sense of having been made unreal. Not just unloved, not just excluded, but ontologically diminished.
The question isn’t only “who am I without this community?” although that question is enormous enough on its own. It’s something more foundational: “Am I, if no one who knew me will acknowledge that I am?”
This is the specific existential harm of shunning that distinguishes it from other forms of social rejection. It’s not just that people chose not to be around you, it’s that they chose, collectively and deliberately, to act as though you don’t exist. And the human psyche, which depends on relational recognition for its very sense of reality, registers that as a threat that goes all the way down.
What Recovery Requires
Recovery from shunning is not a straightforward process, and anyone who tells you it is hasn’t been through it or sat with enough people who have.
It requires finding new sources of relational recognition that are robust enough, over time, to begin constituting a new relational context within which identity can be rebuilt. Shunning often leaves people with profound disruptions to their capacity for trust, with hypervigilance to the possibility of future rejection, and with attachment patterns that make the vulnerability required for genuine connection feel genuinely dangerous. The people who most need new relational experiences are often the people for whom new relational experiences feel most threatening.
It requires grieving losses that are both enormous and ambiguous, in a context where the people who would ordinarily help you grieve significant losses are precisely the people the grief is about. The social support that most people access when dealing with major loss is not available to people whose major loss is their social support.
It requires making sense of what happened in a way that locates responsibility accurately, which is complicated when the people who harmed you are people you loved and who genuinely believed they were acting out of love and obedience. The anger and the grief are legitimate and necessary. And they’re directed at people for whom you may also still hold real tenderness. All of that has to be held at the same time.
It requires, eventually, to develop a framework for understanding what happened that doesn’t depend on the community’s account of it, because the community’s account of it is that they did the right thing, that God required it, that your pain is the consequence of your own choices. Developing your own account, one grounded in your own perceptions and values rather than the system’s narrative, is one of the central tasks of recovery. And it’s a task that the shunning itself makes harder, because shunning is specifically designed to undermine your confidence in your own account of reality.
Naming It for What It Is
When shunning is described as a painful but understandable expression of deeply held religious conviction, the harm gets absorbed into a framework of religious freedom that makes accountability nearly impossible. When it’s described as a personal and communal spiritual choice, the organised and coercive dimension disappears. When it’s described in the soft language of “difficulty” or “distance” or “estrangement,” the specific and deliberate nature of what’s being done to the shunned person gets lost.
Naming it accurately doesn’t require us to deny the sincerity of the people who practise it. People can be sincere and still be causing violence, sincerity has never been a reliable measure of harm.
What naming it accurately does is give survivors the language to describe what happened to them without minimising it. It gives practitioners the framework to understand what they’re treating. And it gives the wider public a clearer picture of what these practices actually do to human beings.
You were not simply excluded.
You were not simply distanced.
You were subjected to organised relational violence, by people who had decided that your non-existence served them better than your presence.
You deserved better.
References:
Eisenberger, N. I., Lieberman, M. D., & Williams, K. D. (2003). Does rejection hurt? An fMRI study of social exclusion. Science, 302(5643), 290–292.
Stark, E. (2007). Coercive control: How men entrap women in personal life. Oxford University Press.
Williams, K. D., Cheung, C. K. T., & Choi, W. (2000). Cyberostracism: Effects of being ignored over the Internet. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(5), 748–762.