Religious Trauma
Religious trauma is a real thing.
No matter how many people troll the internet to inaccurately argue that ”everyone has a little bit of church hurt” or “you were never a real believer after all” or “you just want to do what feels good to you instead of die to self”.
It is real because spiritual abuse and adverse religious experiences are real. Not everyone has a trauma response to what they encounter in a religious or spiritual context, but a lot of people do. You are not alone if you have.
Are you having symptoms of trauma related to adverse religious experiences?
What is Religious Trauma?
To understand Religious Trauma, it’s important to first understand what trauma is.
Trauma isn’t about the event itself—like a car accident or violent encounter. Instead, trauma is what happens inside a person’s mind and body after the event. It’s revealed through symptoms, which are the body’s way of signaling unhealed emotional wounds.
Religious Trauma refers to the psychological and physical symptoms that arise in response to harmful or adverse religious experiences.
Because religious teachings and communities differ widely, what one person might see as an adverse experience could look very different for someone else. Not everyone exposed to challenging religious experiences will develop trauma.
While it’s helpful to know common themes of Adverse Religious Experiences, there’s a wide range of situations that can contribute to trauma. A person’s age and the length of time they were exposed to a particular religious environment can also play a role in how trauma manifests.
If you’ve ever been taught that your heart is deceitful, your mind fallen, your emotions dangerous, and your body sinful because of the messages from your faith system, you can probably relate to the kind of healing work survivors of religious trauma are doing. Untangling dehumanizing beliefs from our sense of self is no small task. If you’ve learned not to trust yourself, you likely understand the difficulty of giving yourself permission to acknowledge the truth in your thoughts, feelings, and physical responses. My role is to help you navigate and make sense of that tension.
Working with a religious trauma therapist isn’t just about challenging old beliefs with someone in the room. My focus is on helping you create safety within yourself—not just recalibrating or persuading the mind. Healing from dehumanization requires reconnecting with your humanity, and that means restoring your relationship with your body, intuition, and identity.
I draw on a blend of Person-Centered Therapy, Polyvagal Theory, Internal Family Systems (IFS), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Narrative Therapy, and Somatic Therapy. What does all that mean for you? It means I approach our work together with hope, acceptance, and curiosity, while also bringing science and research to support your healing journey. These approaches have been transformational for me, and I hope they’ll be just as meaningful for you.
What you might be going through…
Your courage to question and reconsider long-held beliefs is a powerful step toward reclaiming your individuality. Challenging these beliefs can bring about change—and while change can be liberating, it can also be difficult. You may feel a little lost as your reality shifts, or perhaps stuck as old messages and thought patterns continue to block your path to joy. You might be grieving the loss of familiar ways of interacting with your community, or navigating fractured relationships with family and friends.
Perhaps you’ve struggled to experience true freedom or fully embrace your sexuality due to the constraints of purity culture. You might feel unable to express your LGBTQI+ identity openly, or you may find yourself grappling with intense anger or difficult emotions. A lingering fear of hell might still weigh on you.
For all these reasons—and many more—you might find yourself feeling anxious, depressed, controlling, or carrying an unspoken pain that’s hard to put into words. In some cases, the experiences you’ve had may have led to Religious Trauma. Whatever the depth of your pain, healing begins with creating a sense of safety within yourself.
Healing Begins with Safety
Healing from an adverse religious past begins with establishing a sense of safety in your body, mind, and relationships.
Restrictive fundamentalism does much to undo our feeling of connectedness and safety within our self.
We will address how to feel safe in your body, safe in your thoughts, accepting and welcoming your emotions (all of them!), and feeling connected and safe with family and friends, and in community.
Definitions
-
Any experience of a religious belief, practice, or structure that undermines an individual's sense of safety or autonomy and/or negatively impacts ones physical, social, emotional, relational, or psychological well-being.
-
Spiritual abuse is the conscious or unconscious use of power to direct, control, or manipulate another’s body, thoughts, emotions, actions, or capacity for choice, freedom, or autonomy of self, within a spiritual or religious context.
Spiritual abuse does not have to be intentional to be abuse. The impact matters more than the intent.
-
The physical, emotional, or psychological response to religious beliefs, practices, or structures that overwhelm an individual’s ability to cope
-
Process of evaluation and altering ones previously held beliefs, lifestyle, relationship, or worldview.
Often involves an inner examination of the ways you have internalized inferiority, superiority, power, and exploitation
-
Process of releasing and no longer claiming ones previously held religious beliefs or identity
-
Some symptoms only occur after the person has experienced life outside of the religious environment and been exposed to other ways of thinking and being.
Symptoms can include bouts of intense panic, anxiety, depression, rage, fears/nightmares about going to hell, confusion, poor critical thinking ability, limited beliefs about self-ability/self-worth, difficulty allowing oneself to experience pleasure, black and white thinking, and sexual difficulties.
You may feel anxiety about questioning your beliefs, trouble believing your own thoughts and feelings are valid, difficulty understanding healthy sexuality, and grief about questioning or detaching from a belief system that was seen as fundamental to your well-being.
Someone’s “good intentions” do not negate abuse. Like other forms of abuse, spiritual abuse is about maintaining power and control over others.
It can come from anyone who claims to have the truth, who claims to speak for God or higher power, or has a special interest in your conformity to a belief system.
Harmful religious experiences can have long-term effects.
Do any of the following resonate with you?
You spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to do things "right" and "faithfully" to avoid being labeled as having lost your faith or being "bad."
You experienced a sense of freedom and joy when you broke away, but now you feel isolated and misunderstood.
You’re unsure of who you are now or how to move forward, feeling stuck in the process.
You struggle to express what you want or need to your family and friends, or sometimes you don’t even know what you want or need.
You feel shame about your body and sexuality, carrying the messages of purity culture that told you these aspects of yourself are sinful.
You hesitate to openly express your sexual or gender identity, unsure of how others will react.
Your relationship with your family is strained, and you feel judged or rejected for who you’ve become.
You lie awake at night, haunted by fears of hell—even though you don’t believe in it anymore.
You’re devouring books and resources to make sense of everything, but find yourself feeling angry and sad because of how it challenges what you were taught.
You find it difficult to separate the beliefs you were taught from who you want to be now or how you want to make decisions.
Religious Trauma Therapy Can Help You Get To A Better Place
Even if you feel lost or stuck, it’s possible to feel better.
Reconnect with who you are outside of religion.
Find safety from painful relationships with family and friends.
Learn to honor and love your body, sexuality, sexual orientation, and gender identity.
Stop feeling shame and learn to love yourself.
Make peace with emotional pain, anxiety, and fear.
Recover from experiences preventing authentic living, relating, and moving through the world wholeheartedly.
If you are experiencing symptoms related to religious trauma, you deserve a safe place to do this work. Healing is your birth right!
I work with clients from a trauma trained orientation which means increased focus on the ways that trauma impacts the body and the mind, as well as access to clinical interventions specific to healing trauma. Treating Religious Trauma means that we account for the needed safety in the therapy relationship, as well as increasing trust within one’s own capacity to sit with emotions and body sensations before working through trauma.
-
When we come together in regular sessions, we begin to dismantle the messages you received about yourself that were toxic and shame-producing.
We talk about boundaries, self-compassion, mindfulness meditation, what religious trauma is, what a trauma response feels like, how to move through difficult emotions, and what it actually means to “feel your feelings”. We’ll talk about how to heal past wounds, handle your grief, resolve trauma, and move forward to a life very much worth living.
I am always striving to work within your comfort zone while safely inviting you to take one step further. It can feel overwhelming and vulnerable at first, but you will soon feel that you are in charge of the pace we take things. I will definitely challenge you, but will also affirm you every step of the way.
-
I work from an informed position about Adverse Religious Experiences. Clients with Religious Trauma often feel apprehensive that a therapist won’t understand or support their experience associated with religion or worse that they might frame the therapy relationship with their own religious bias. An uniformed therapist’s religious bias can leave clients feeling misunderstood, or further isolated in their experiences.
I understand religious trauma from my personal context. I have pursued therapy on my own journey with this experience and continue to pursue both professional and personal guidance while continuing in this space. I will work within the framework of your current religious or spiritual worldview (or none at all). I am open to discussing the parts of my experience that could be helpful in fostering a trusting therapeutic relationship. I’m also happy to discuss any questions or concerns you might have before starting therapy for Religious Trauma. Feel free to reach out and learn more!
-
Not at all! I support every person’s ability to access whatever religious or spiritual practices they find helpful and meaningful. Much of therapy includes holding two opposite beliefs at once. Religion follows this route as, there can be both good and bad within any context. I find there is value in making room for all the sides of these narratives both individually and as a therapist.
I am anti-harm, -abuse, -control, -power, but not anti-religion. I believe each person is unique, including what is valuable and important for them in matters of faith, religion and spirituality. It is not my place or goal to determine what your faith, religion, or spiritual practices or lack of should be. While discussing faith and faith systems are a welcome part of the therapeutic process, the goal is for you to define what is meaningful and important so authentic expression of your lived values can be the byproduct in your life.
-
That is a great question! The short answer is, that is not a problem. If you need to process a religious experience but do not have symptoms of trauma, you still deserve a safe place to share and explore what this means to you! I work with clients on religious exploration and transitions as well as trauma.
-
This is for anyone who wants to work through their unique journey surrounding religion. Clients of any denomination, orientation or belief system are welcome here. If finding a therapist with a specific religious orientation is valuable to you, I will be glad to send you references in the local community that would fit your preferences!
-
I see clients from mainstream religious backgrounds, less common religious systems, cult practices, and more. If there is additional information I need to understand your unique journey, I will do my best to learn from you and other sources of information so that you feel supported and understood.
-
A few places to start might be:
Normal Religious Trauma Process
Change
Life happens. Shift happens. Sometimes life changes with or without our gracious consent.
Fear
A season of questioning religious systems and beliefs can be excruciatingly painful. The newness can feel unsafe and dangerous. Or perhaps lonely and isolating. The fear of rejection from God and from others feels suffocating as emotions such as shame, guilt, fear, anger, and sadness take center stage. The consequences of such a prismatic array of emotions are sleepless nights, hiding, pretending, unhealthy addictions, isolating, ruminating, disordered eating and engaging in a whole variety of other coping behaviors.
Claim
A faith shift doesn’t mean you are a bitter, prodigal son or daughter who chose to take all the beautiful things you learned, along with your rich inheritance of the Christian faith, only to squander it in some big debauched and satanic soirée. Instead, you have come to realize that certain elements of current religious principles, practices, policies, and/or attitudes no longer feel congruent with who you are becoming.
