What is religious trauma?
Signs of religious trauma and how therapy helps (UK)
This article has been on my mind to write for the last few weeks because it’s at the heart of the work that I offer clients and at the heart of a number of my client’s stories.
Strangely though, I’m sat here now wondering what words will make up such a loaded and complicated subject. Especially because although I (along with nearly all therapists) work with clients’ “trauma” all the time, religious trauma has a different and unique scope that will be helpful to talk about as a separate and important experience.
So, some things I hope you get out of this fairly short piece of writing today:
- If you’re looking for some understanding of your experiences in a religious setting that you know were not healthy, you can start matching some language to it. This means working out if the signs you’re experiencing point to unprocessed trauma.
- A sense that hopefully it will help you know if therapy is something that would help you right now, or not!
Let’s start with a definition…
I’ve been thinking about how to best word religious trauma, and something along these lines feels about right:
Religious trauma is the lasting harm that comes from living inside a system where faith is used as a tool for control, through fear, shame, or the suppression of who you are. It isn’t just something that happened to you in the past; it’s the ongoing weight of navigating a world after you’ve walked away. It involves the spiritual abuse you endured while inside, and the disorienting loss of meaning and connection once you leave.
Alongside so many other experiences, religious and spiritual trauma resides within us from very unique lived experiences. As this definition suggests, it can occur from one or many different scenarios within a religious or spiritual setting, whether that’s a church, mosque, synagogue, or other spiritual community. When thinking about power dynamics and religious leaders (ordained, paid, volunteer, or otherwise), something that you may have experienced in childhood, teenage years, or early adulthood could have stayed hidden within for many years and is now catching up with you.
James’s Story
James grew up in the church. It was a regular kind of church, not particularly charismatic or “ultra-religious.” Many of the congregation would attend out of religiosity, maybe even an unsaid superstition, rather than for some zealous hyper-spiritual reason. His mum took him along most Sundays and he grew up in Sunday school. A quiet and well-behaved kid, James wouldn’t answer back or even think to question anything he’d been taught.
In fact, James pretty much admired the leaders around him and saw the pastor as a warm and fatherly figure, someone he’d trust implicitly. James grew up, got involved in church, and was well-behaved, especially when it came to those in authority. James’s church leader and youth leader, like many, were kind humans (albeit with some conservative and orthodox views of the world), and this story doesn’t have any horrible twist.
James, however, grew up with some really heavy and confusing feelings around church and his own spirituality. In his late twenties, James began his journey of untangling the Christian web he had grown up in, and so began his faith deconstruction journey. It was a lonely and daunting path, but also one that brought to the surface these intense feelings that he felt he couldn’t connect to his lived experience.
After all, James’s memory was that of a kind and loving church upbringing; he had a few friends and no one did anything bad to him.
So why did this kind of childhood experience for James lead to such complicated behaviour and feelings?
Many of us will have had experiences like James, pretty unremarkable on the surface. But what has James been carrying all this time throughout his life in different spaces and relationships? It’s in these quiet stories that so much can go unchecked. Maybe some of the following are things you have experienced too that I imagine James would want to explore in therapy:
- Inability to make decisions without seeking external validation
- Hypervigilance to authority figures
- Feeling ‘empty’ when you’re alone with your thoughts
- Guilt and/or shame about past beliefs, doubt, or current lack of beliefs
One of the things that regularly comes up for clients is not being able to pinpoint a specific traumatic event. Trauma doesn’t necessarily come from a one-off event. It also doesn’t have to be from sexual or physical abuse or harm.
Perhaps some of your assumptions of trauma may shift when you begin to realise how your body is still reacting to the past and how your thinking doesn’t quite connect with your feeling.
In therapy, we look at how those early messages shaped your nervous system. We might explore how the need to please authority figures carried over into your relationships, or how the silence around doubt became a wall between you and yourself.
When we start to piece the puzzle together, we might think about your past, childhood, growing up, a bit like James. What kind of relationships were there that impacted him? With all these elements comes a greater self-awareness.
You might not be ready to talk yet, but do feel free to subscribe to my writings. This is a separate, yet I believe holistic, part of resourcing and equipping you without having to be in the therapy room.
If you are ready to work together or would like a short conversation to explore, I would love to hear from you.