Four Ways a Therapist Can Help You Heal From Religious Trauma
If the pain, depression, and anxiety related to your religious trauma have been steering the ship for awhile, it can be difficult to imagine how anything could help. Perhaps you’ve already tried self-caring your way through it with meditation, yoga, and exercise, and nothing so far has alleviated your symptoms.
Perhaps you’ve even tried therapy but did not have a positive experience. Maybe the therapist wasn’t a good personality fit for you, or religious trauma and spiritual abuse were not their specialty and it felt like you spent most of the sessions explaining to them what terms like purity culture, accountability group, or worship team mean.
If nothing so far has worked, it is normal to feel discouraged. But I am here to tell you that therapy (with a therapist who is a good fit for you and who specializes in religious trauma) can most certainly help!
You do not have to process the harm you experienced in high control religion alone.
You deserve attention, care, and support.
Here are some ways a religious trauma therapist can help you on your healing journey:
Support from a licensed and trained professional:
Yes, it can be helpful to talk to friends. Yes it can be helpful to talk to certain family members. But as helpful and supportive as those people might be, they are likely not equipped or trained to help someone heal from complex and painful experiences like trauma. Your friends and family are also likely very biased toward you, which on the one hand is great that you have their support, but on the other hand might mean they have some blind spots toward you that keep them from being able to see the full picture about how to help you or what you need.
Licensed therapists have literally spent thousands upon thousands of hours in school, in internships, in supervision, and in training programs learning about mental health, human development, psychological and emotional processes, therapeutic interventions, and how to help people grow, heal, change, and be the best versions of themselves.
With a therapist who also specializes in religious trauma, you get the added benefit of someone with a deep knowledge of high control religious systems and their impact on individuals, how religious trauma manifests, and what the path of rebuilding looks like after faith deconstruction (i.e. someone who gets it!).
Space to explore feelings that were previously off-limits:
If you have spent any time in high control religion, you know that feeling and expressing certain emotions can be problematic. If you are feeling anxiety or fear, you might have been told those emotions are displeasing to God because they say you don’t have enough faith that he will work out whatever it is that you are anxious or fearful about. If you are feeling sad, it may have been suggested that you should not have grown too attached to the person/thing/situation you lost because it belonged to God to take back whenever he wanted. If you feel angry about being mistreated or an injustice that was done to you, you may have been told to just forgive.
The problem with this is that it sets up “negative” emotions as shameful experiences to get rid of instead of valuable information to pay attention to. When you are feeling anxious about something, your internal world is actually alerting you to a threat and urging you to get yourself to safety. When you are feeling sad, your internal world is alerting you to the fact that you lost something that meant a lot to you and you need to grieve. If you are feeling angry, your internal world might be communicating that something important to you was violated and you need to take action toward justice.
Talking with a therapist will give you the space you need and deserve to start paying attention to your emotional world. As psychologist Diana Fosha has stated, feelings are the arc of experience between a problem and a solution. When we have the freedom to feel without having to judge whether those feelings are right or wrong, we can often start moving from the problem to the solution.
Education about symptoms of trauma and how they show up:
A therapist is going to have a working knowledge of trauma, how it affects someone’s mind and body, what PTSD symptoms look like, and how they can be treated. A religious trauma therapist is going to have specialized knowledge about how religious harm affects the brain, how it causes people to disconnect from their bodies (because they were taught their bodies were evil), and the complexities of being traumatized in a harmful environment and community for years.
For instance, did you know that there is research that has come out in recent years that has shown that survivors of sexual abuse / assault and survivors of purity culture have similarities and overlaps in the cluster of symptoms they experience (avoidance of physical closeness, anxiety about and hyper vigilance against sexual situations, dissociating from the body, sexual shame, etc.), even for those purity culture survivors who have not had a sexual experience? This suggests that purity culture is actually a form of sexual trauma. It is a common experience for survivors of purity culture to feel sexually broken, inept, and ashamed, and to be hyper-critical of themselves for struggling so much with their sexuality. Imagine going from the belief of “Something is wrong with me” to “A wrong was done to me.” Knowledge is power!
Identification of the fear and shame based narratives you were indoctrinated with:
One thing that high control religion is great at (unfortunately) is teaching people that most aspects of being human are shameful and scary. For instance, “my body is bad and will cause others to stumble" or “my thoughts can’t be trusted and will lead me astray.”
When we are isolation, it is difficult to notice where and how often these fear and shame based narratives surface. A therapist can mirror back to you what you think and feel about yourself and call bullshit on inaccurate storylines that you may have been taught (i.e. I’m bad, I’m the problem, my needs and wants should come last). Together you might find that they pop up more often than you were aware of, and together you can start rewriting the script.
Do you resonate with any of the above? Healing is possible! I work with clients everyday who have experienced religious harm and who are doing the work to tend to their pain, identify and disrupt the harmful narratives they were indoctrinated with, and rebuild their lives.
If you are ready to start unpacking what happened to you in high control religion with a therapist who specializes in religious trauma, spiritual abuse, and faith deconstruction, I’m accepting new clients in CA, FL, and MO. Send me a message to request a free 15 minute consultation to get started.