If you’ve realized your religious experience has had a harmful impact on you, you may be feeling a complicated array of emotions. Religious trauma can result in anxiety, depression, anger, sadness, uncertainty, and more. Often people leaving rigid religious communities find that they have a grieving process to go through, as well as finding a new direction and purpose for their lives. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (or ACT, for short) is an approach that is well-suited to navigating this need to process complicated emotions and choose a path forward.
ACT in a nutshell involves building acceptance towards unwanted or challenging thoughts and feelings, and commitment towards doing what matters. This may sound simple, but the stormy emotions and anxious thoughts that can come after leaving a religion can feel overwhelming, so having a way to guide you through this can be helpful.
ACT in its most basic form has three components: opening up, getting present, and doing what matters. Let’s take a look at how each of these components can help you face your religious trauma.
Opening up to the difficult feelings that come from leaving a high control religion
As you go through the process of leaving a rigid religious community you are probably noticing many complicated emotions and thoughts. If you find yourself wanting to push away these emotions, you are not alone. These emotions can feel intense and uncomfortable, and you may have heard a lot of cultural messages around moving on and getting past things both in your religion and in wider society. However, pushing these emotions away can sometimes make things worse. It’s like pushing a beach ball under the water – the more you push, the higher that ball is going to come bouncing back out of the water.
ACT therapy encourages making space for difficult thoughts and emotions. By doing this, we aren’t saying that what happened was ok, or approving of what happened, but we are acknowledging that something did happen, and it did leave an impact on us. The more we can make space for our spectrum of thoughts and feelings, the more capacity we have to create the life we want. We are creating more flexibility in our life by allowing difficult thoughts and feelings to arise and exist within us.
For example, you might find yourself in a tug of war between the thoughts of “I am so angry that everyone I loved rejected me when I left my religion” and “I shouldn’t be angry, it’s important to forgive, and I see why they are acting the way they are.” Opening up to this experience might involve telling yourself “it’s ok to be angry. Anger is an emotion that tells me something or someone hurt me, and it’s a part of being human to feel this.” You might ask yourself “where do I feel anger in my body? Can I send a warm, caring thought to the part of my body that feels anger?” You might recognize that you are allowed to feel angry even if others don’t understand why you’re angry and that you are allowed to decide if and when you forgive those involved.
Getting present to the life you are living now
The next element of the ACT approach is getting present. Once you have made space for your thoughts and feelings, ACT guides you to connect with the present moment or what’s happening in the here and now. You may have stopped believing harmful beliefs from your former religion yet continue to hear those beliefs coming up in your mind. For example, you might decide that you want a more equal marriage than what was taught to you in your religion, but your mind is ringing with old messages about what a marriage is supposed to look like. Getting present can involve recognizing both the messages and feelings from the past, and connecting with what’s happening in the present.
In this example, you might try saying to yourself “I notice that it feels very scary to violate old rules about how I should be in a marriage, but I also notice that the life I want now involves me speaking up for my needs.” Religious trauma can sometimes draw us into the past, making us feel unsafe, and so getting present might also involve noticing elements about your present environment that helps you recognize that you’re not in your former harmful environment. You might notice cues that help you feel present, such as noticing sensory aspects of your experience (“I notice that I’m in my home surrounded by my favorite plants, which remind me that I’m creating the life that makes me happy”) or noticing interpersonal aspects (“I notice that my partner is asking me what I need, wants the best for me, and is also working towards unlearning these old rules.”)
Doing what matters to create your authentic, joyful life
After leaving a restrictive religious environment you likely find yourself lacking purpose and at a loss for how to live your life. If you’ve been told for many years how you are supposed to spend your time and what you are supposed to believe, it can be overwhelming to no longer have something external guiding you. This is both scary and liberating at the same time – now you can do whatever you want! ACT helps us reflect and decide what we want our life to be about, and how we’ll take actionable steps towards that life.
In ACT, doing what matters is all about connecting to your own personal values – the actions, qualities, things, and people that matter the most to you. You may feel that figuring out your values is a tall order, so I recommend starting small if you’re in the process of rebuilding life after religious hurt. I find that inner child work can be helpful here – can you connect to a youthful part of you that had desires and knew what mattered to you? Some of us have to go wayyy back to find this younger version of ourselves – maybe it’s 3 year old you who loved to get messy, 5 year old you who wanted to know everything about cars, 9 year old you who spoke up about injustices you noticed, or 13 year old you who had a crush on someone the same gender as you. Maybe you can give yourself some space to explore your deepest desires – sometimes at first this only feels safe to do when we’re alone. You might set aside a weekly alone date with yourself to do something you truly want to do to start to get to know who you are underneath your religious programming.
Putting it all together to move towards life beyond religious harm
Often I find that describing ACT is simple, but putting it into practice can take some trial and error. I encourage you to start small, perhaps picking one example from this article to practice in your life. Depending on how impactful your religious harm was, you may find it helpful to seek counseling to guide you in this process. If you’re in Texas, I help people over video in my counseling practice – you can book a free introductory call here. If you’re outside of Texas and want help finding a counselor, I recommend checking out this directory of ACT therapists and this directory of religious trauma therapists.
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