Discover who you are beyond the impact of restrictive religious experiences

Religious trauma is a response you experience physically, emotionally, and/or psychologically as a result of being exposed to religious teachings, practices, or structures that overwhelm your ability to cope and return to a sense of safety. Religious trauma can have adverse effects on your physical, mental, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being. This trauma can come from specific experiences of abuse within a religious community, or it can develop over a long period of time through hearing harmful religious messages repeatedly.

Religious trauma differs from religious stress or doubt in that your harmful experiences have a lasting impact on your emotional well-being and ability to cope with stressors. However, religious trauma counseling can be helpful for a range of experiences - you don’t necessarily have to know if what you experienced was traumatic to benefit from this type of therapy. If you have experienced religious stress or you are going through religious doubt, you can benefit from having a safe space in a counseling environment to explore these feelings.

Religious trauma can include symptoms of PTSD, such as hypervigilance, intrusive memories of the trauma, difficulty sleeping, and avoidance symptoms like trying not to think about memories of the trauma. Because religious trauma often comes from the harmful messages you received and internalized, symptoms can also include persistent feelings of shame, low self-esteem, perfectionism, and difficulty speaking up for yourself or setting boundaries. Many people leaving high-control religions also struggle with disordered eating, poor body image, and substance abuse.

Yes, anxiety, panic, and OCD-like fears are common experiences among those who have experienced religious trauma. Harmful religious teachings, such as those about eternal damnation, maintaining purity, or homophobic messages, can send your body into a chronic state of alert and self-evaluation. Over time, this can lead to symptoms of anxiety, panic, or obsessions and compulsions. Religious trauma therapy aims to help you regain a sense of internal safety and challenge these harmful beliefs.

Religious Trauma Syndrome is a term coined by Marlene Winell in 2011 to describe a condition experienced by people who are struggling to leave an authoritarian, dogmatic religion and are coping with damaging indoctrination.

Adverse religious experiences are any experience of a religious belief, practice, or structure that undermines an individual’s sense of safety or autonomy and/or negatively impacts their physical, social, emotional, relational, or psychological wellbeing. This term was defined by the Religious Trauma Institute and the Reclamation Collective starting around 2019.

Both terms are widely used by religious trauma therapists and people recovering from religious harm to better communicate about their experiences, though neither terms have been utilized in more formal ways such as in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. If either term is helpful for you, I support you using them to better describe and understand your experience. Personally, I typically use adverse religious experiences more commonly than religious trauma syndrome, as I feel the wording is less pathologizing of the individual, and instead incorporates the structural issues that contributed to a person’s struggles.

For many people, this question may take some time to unpack, but there are a few common signs. Often, there is a power structure where a leader or leaders are deferred to, and individuals find themselves denying their own feelings, identity, or needs to remain included in the group.

In spiritually abusive situations, a person’s fear is manipulated in order to control them. You may be taught to fear eternal damnation if you don’t follow certain rules, or fear being ostracized from your religious community if you don’t stay in line with the expectations of the community. Economic abuse may occur, where you are guilted into giving money to the religious community, are discouraged from seeking employment outside of the community, or are pressured into doing unpaid labor for the community.

If you are part of a marginalized group, such as being a woman, a member of the LGBTQ+ community, or a person of color, you may be more prone to abuse, as many high-control religions utilize patriarchal and white privilege to maintain power and control over their membership.

Therapy for religious trauma gives you a space to examine all the messages you have been told in order to sort out what was harmful, what you’ve internalized, and what you would like to let go of. Therapy also helps you mindfully connect with your body and emotions, as you may have been indoctrinated to disconnect from your relationship with yourself.

Often, people leaving a harmful religious group have difficulty speaking up, setting boundaries, and navigating relationships in a healthy manner, and therapy offers you tools to more confidently say no and get your relational needs met in a balanced way. Therapy is also a place where you can navigate what your future looks like - figuring out what healthy community participation is, what you believe in, and where you’d like to focus your energy and your time.

You don’t have to leave your faith to heal from religious trauma, and I work with people who end up in a variety of places spiritually and religiously as a part of their deconstruction and healing process. If you want to continue practicing your religion, we can explore the pros and cons of staying in your current religious community, ask whether finding a more affirming and compassionate religious community might be right for you, and identify how you can practice your religion in a more self-compassionate and sustainable way.

Alternatively, if you are considering leaving your religion, changing religions, or becoming non-religious, our work together will be a safe place to explore these options as well. If it’s helpful to know, I’m a non-religious and secular person, and I’m fully open and validating of you landing in a variety of places after exploring and healing from religious trauma.

These are common themes that I see in working with people dealing with religious trauma. Often, our first step is working on building self-compassion, which means building a kinder relationship with yourself. This may involve learning to speak to yourself in a supportive way when shame or guilt arises. We’ll also work to understand where these shame messages came from, so that you can start to see that these are messages that were given to you, and not signs that you are inherently shameful or worthy of chronic guilt.

We’ll also work to rebuild your values system so that you can distinguish between healthy guilt that comes from things that matter to you and unhealthy guilt that comes from harmful messages that you no longer believe in. In general, our goal is to help you build a relationship with yourself based on support, respect, and care, rather than self-criticism and fear of punishment.

This is a common impact of religious trauma, and is often a large focus of the counseling work I do with people. Your high-demand religion likely influenced you to deny your own needs, prioritize the needs of others over yourself, and think of yourself as inherently sinful or impure. You may have been punished overtly or covertly for speaking up or contradicting the rules and beliefs of your community, which over time can lead to difficulty setting boundaries or feeling confident in yourself.

Therapy for religious trauma can help you build a more supportive relationship with yourself, learn to advocate for your needs and desires, and guide you to pursue relationships built on equality and mutual respect. We’ll also explore developing (or re-developing) critical thinking skills, allowing you to examine what you believe and want to stand for before deferring to others.

Having concerns about confidentiality is understandable after being a part of a high-control religion. You may have had difficulty in the past finding someone you can trust with your doubts and questions. Therapy is a completely confidential process, other than a few legal exceptions that I’ll go over with you in your first session.

Additionally, I’m a non-religious therapist, so you can be assured that I am unlikely to have any connection with your religious group. I value your privacy and want you to feel safe enough to share openly about your experiences in order to heal.