Healing, Growth, & Exploration After Religious Trauma
If you’ve had a church experience that has left you confused, angry or traumatized, you are not alone.
Religion and spirituality can be beautiful avenues of contemplation, love, growth, and wisdom. But they can also be avenues of harm.
Whether ill-intentioned or not, many churches/religions use the concept of God, absolute morality, and holy texts to pressure, manipulate, and control. Instead of pointing people toward the freedom, love, and truth they profess to value, they lead them into confusion, disempowerment, and even shame.
How Do We Heal?
One misconception that controlling religion can spread is that there is one “right” way to live, to heal, or to be whole. In reality, there is no one formula for healing. There are many pathways to wholeness, and life is inevitably messy. The goal isn’t perfection, but to be fully alive.
For me, psychology, spirituality, and physicality have all held invaluable treasures for me in my journey forward.
Exercise, sports, dancing, singing, and play.
We often learn to disconnect from our bodies in toxic churches: we are taught to suppress our desires, ignore our bodies warning signals that something is wrong, and value our hearts, minds, souls above our bodies. Reconnecting with our bodies is powerful and necessary to our healing.
Raw Honesty with God
Read the psalms if you want inspiration. David, Moses, Jacob, Elijah, and countless other biblical figures were raw and honest with God. They asked questions. They expressed doubts. They poured out their unfiltered emotions. Why can’t we?
Self-Compassion
Perfectionism is a core part of controlling religion. But we weren’t created to be perfect. We weren’t created to be robots whose only objective is productivity. We are human. Learning to be kind to ourselves and to accept ourselves is deeply restorative.
Getting in Touch with What You Want
Many of us learned to sacrifice ourselves constantly in order to make others happy. We were taught that this was not only pleasing to God, but necessary to please God. Along the way, we lost our very selves. We lost connection with our desires, needs, and preferences. Asking ourselves, “What do I want?” can be surprisingly significant.
Practicing Boundaries
Learning to say no is challenging if you have spent significant time in a community where that was discouraged. There may have been severe consequences (whether directly or indirectly communicated) for disagreeing or disobeying your leaders. It takes time, but we must learn our own separateness and find our voices once again.
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