High control religions dictate all aspects of life, and parenting is no exception. Many restrictive religious communities offer parenting guidance either overtly or covertly. From sermons on the topic to social pressure to parent a particular way, parents can feel an enormous amount of pressure to parent in line with their religious community’s expectations. In addition to this, many parents become overwhelmed by their own religious trauma and attempts to stay in good standing with the religion, which can distract their parenting. All of these factors can lead to parenting styles that contribute to the harm some people feel coming out of restrictive religious communities. This post outlines three common parenting styles that can contribute to religious trauma, and how they might be affecting you as an adult. (Though this list is not meant to be exhaustive!)
Content note: This post includes descriptions of various harsh parenting styles, including discussions of physical harm. Take breaks as needed while reading, and you may find this grounding exercise helpful if you become overwhelmed.
Religious trauma parenting style #1: The authoritarian parent
The authoritarian parent leans on rules and strict discipline when raising their children. If your religious community had an authoritarian leadership style, it’s likely that your parents took on this style at home. Sermons and Bible study lessons may have reinforced these messages, encouraging parents to enact strong discipline to keep their children on the straight and narrow path to religious adherence.
In its harshest form, physical punishment may have been sanctioned by the religious community, or even encouraged. The phrase “spare the rod, spoil the child” may have been frequently referenced to justify this. This form of punishment may have been viewed as a tool to influence moral and spiritual development (though research shows that spanking is not an effective form of moral influence on children.)
Effects of authoritarian parenting
If you were raised with a religious authoritarian parent, you may find yourself struggling with your mental health and self confidence as an adult. According to studies based on attachment theory, children need a certain amount of nurturing and safety in order to grow up confident and able to feel secure in themselves. When parents are more focused on discipline than nurturing, this crucial childhood need is neglected, which can lead to depression, anxiety, and difficulty feeling calm in relationships.
If the authoritarian parenting included spanking or other forms of physical harm, you may be more likely to struggle with your mental health as an adult. Research shows that children who are spanked experience more mental health challenges and lower self-esteem. There is evidence to show that children experience spanking as a form of threat, which leads them to struggle to feel secure in relationships. It makes sense – if the person you love and says they love you can also hurt you, it’s difficult to settle into that relationship and feel trusting. Our brains are designed to generalize threats so that we can avoid future hurt, so you may come to believe that others are also capable of hurting you, leaving you to feel on guard often.
Many people also internalize these harsh parenting styles and come to believe there is something wrong with them. This is how authoritarian styles can lead to low self-esteem. Essentially, if you continually hear messages that you are messing up, you may come to believe that there is something wrong with you at your core. This can be especially damaging if your parents provide little to no warmth, nurturing, and care to counteract moments of harshness.
Religious trauma parenting style #2: The neglectful parent
Some parents who are involved in high control religion are impacted by their own fraught relationship with religion. Another word for high control religion is “high demand” religion because often these systems require a lot of time and effort from their followers. If your parent felt pressured to devote themselves to the religion, they may have struggled to balance this devotion with parenting.
Many fundamentalist Christian religions teach the lesson of putting God first, then your spouse, and children last. This message can lead parents to de-prioritize their children for the sake of devoting themselves to their religion and marriage. Other parents find themselves caught up in service to the religious community with little time leftover for childcare. For example, you may have found your parent taking care of seemingly everyone in the community except for you. Not only can this result in neglect, there are some cases where children are exposed to abusive people because of this. This is because the parent is so devoted to serving others that they don’t properly vet who’s allowed to stay at the house or spend a lot of time around the children.
Effects of neglectful parenting
If your parent was neglectful, you likely find yourself to be highly independent as an adult. In some ways this can feel like an advantage, but it can also be detrimental to being able to ask for help and to building interdependent relationships as an adult. You may also struggle to know your own feelings if you rarely had a parent present to help you navigate difficult experiences and make sense of these challenging moments.
Some children of neglectful parenting become “adultified”, meaning they take on adult roles and responsibilities long before it is appropriate. These children may have found themselves caring for siblings, cooking meals, and worrying about adult matters like money well before they are ready for this. As an adult, this can lead to difficulty accepting care from others, a feeling of never being able to rest, and difficulty being playful and creative. If you were expected to be emotionally mature beyond your years, you may feel responsible for everyone’s emotional wellbeing, making it difficult to set boundaries or know what your own feelings are separate from others.
Religious trauma parenting style #3: The anxious parent
Many people respond to restrictive religions with high anxiety. These types of religions often preach harsh teachings around what behaviors can lead to eternal damnation. If exposed to enough “fire and brimstone” style teachings, parents can internalize this and become anxious about the potential to make a big enough mistake to earn this fate.
If your parent was highly anxious because of their religious indoctrination, this likely influenced their parenting style. Children of anxious parents often become anxious themselves, as their parents present a world to them that appears unsafe. Anxious parents may present many complex and confusing rules to live by in order to manage their own anxiety that their children struggle to keep up with or understand.
Children typically thrive if they are allowed to gradually venture out and experience the world. However, if a parent is too overcome by anxiety, they can impede this process and leave their children lacking in confidence to experience challenges and try new things.
Effects of anxious parenting
If you had a parent who was anxious about their religion, you might find that you have become an anxious adult yourself. Anxiety is easy to absorb as a child, and this can result in an adulthood that is filled with generalized worries about many things that can potentially go wrong. Even after taking space away from the religion you were raised in, you might find yourself struggling with fearfulness and tension.
Adult children of anxious religious parents also may find themselves emotionally caretaking others in their lives. Some children of anxious parents find themselves hypervigilant in relationships and overly concerned with attending to others’ feelings. As a child, your anxious parent may have felt overwhelming, and finding ways to calm your parent may have been a way to manage your overwhelm. However, that can lead you to feel unduly responsible for others’ feelings as an adult.
How to heal from parenting styles that contributed to religious trauma
Each of these religious trauma parenting styles can lead to a complex reaction that takes time to untangle and heal from. Often people struggle with chronic anxiety, recurring depression, and/or a persistent feeling of low self-esteem after being raised in environments impacted by high control religion. This can feel pretty daunting to address, but there are methods that can be helpful.
A key factor to work on is your relationship with yourself. One strategy that can be helpful is to work towards building a kinder inner voice. Many of us internalize the messages we received as children into a harsh inner dialogue that criticizes our every move. We can start to undo this by practicing speaking to ourselves in a more nurturing, caring way. A simple way to start this is by imagining how you would speak to a dear friend, a beloved pet, or a small child. Now imagine using that same way of speaking with yourself.
You’ll also want to explore how to change your relationships to others. If you tend to lean towards hyper-independence, you’ll want to explore the barriers you feel to asking others for help and for sharing with others vulnerably. If you lean towards overly caretaking for others, such as worrying about others’ emotions, you’ll want to explore how to set more boundaries and allow others to work through their own difficult feelings. Typically, adult relationships thrive when there is a balance between having some independence while also leaning on each other, but religious trauma can influence us to lose this balance. Start by finding ways to check in with yourself around your needs and wants. Have you forced yourself to resolve all of your needs when you could have asked for help? Have you spent too much time worrying about someone else’s needs while neglecting your own? You’ll start to notice where you need to make adjustments when you get in the habit of checking in with yourself regularly.
These approaches are by no means the only way forward, but are meant to give you a sample of the type of work involved in healing from religious trauma parenting styles. If you resonated with much of this post, you may benefit from working with a religious trauma therapist. If you’re in Texas, I see people in my counseling practice over video and in-person in Houston. You can book a call here if you are interested in learning more. And if you’re outside of Texas, I recommend using the Reclamation Collective therapist directory to find a religious trauma therapist in your area.
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