What Does Religious Trauma Treatment Look Like? (And How it Actually Helps)
Most folks know that therapy exists, but many are aware of what actually takes place during religious trauma treatment. Unlike unhealthy and abusive religious environments, where secrets run rampant, therapy follows a straightforward process that doesn’t rely on secrets.
And a quick PSA before we fully dive in: religious trauma treatment can be conducted in a variety of ways. I’ll be speaking to my own experience as a therapist who works with religious trauma, which means I might not speak to every possible therapeutic approach out there. If you’re already in therapy and have questions about how your provider is working with your religious trauma, I recommend that you ask them directly.
What Is Religious Trauma Treatment?
Religious trauma treatment is a specialized form therapy that helps people recognize, process, and ultimately heal from religious trauma. And if you’re tilting your head asking “What is religious trauma?” or “Do I have religious trauma?” it’s “the emotional, psychological, or physical harm that happens from rigid, fear-based, or controlling religious beliefs, practices, and structures” (Singh et al, 2024).
If you’ve recently decided to leave your religious community or have already left, the trauma you experienced in that environment can take time to process. That trauma can range from seeing morality as a strict binary with no room for nuance, to being unable to make your own decisions unless you get approval from a perceived authority figure first.
While I’m a therapist who happens to work with religious trauma, I want to make sure you know that therapy is one option for working through it (and the approach I’m best suited to write about). Unlike what you might have been taught in your religious environment, you have choices and therapy is simply one of them.
Religious Trauma Treatment in Practice: What to Expect
If you’ve never been to therapy before, it can seem like a bit of a mystery. Instead of leaving you in the dark about what happens during treatment for religious trauma, I’ll run through the basic structure, starting with what the goal for treatment even is and ending with how to tell if treatment is even working. to run through what happens during treatment for religious trauma.
The Goal(s) of Religious Trauma Treatment
No matter the approach, the goals for religious trauma treatment are pretty straightforward:
Recognize that what you experienced was, in fact, traumatic
Learn about how trauma affects how you both understand and navigate the world
Process (aka actually feel) the emotions this trauma has brought up for you (e.g. all the anger, confusion, fear, and sadness you were taught to shove aside)
Practice new ways of expressing your emotions, communicating with yourself and others, connecting with your values, and exercising your autonomy
You might also have goals that are even more specific, depending on your lived experience. Below are some common goals I’ve come across from folks I’ve worked with over the past 9 years working as a therapist:
Experiment with self expression via new clothing styles, haircuts, and hair colors
Learn how to reframe the presence of guilt when making a choice for yourself
Reading books or listening to podcasts on topics that were previously considered forbidden or taboo
Pursuing a new career path that was previously considered inappropriate
Build a social life that allows you to better understand who and what you’re interested in
But the ultimate goal is for you to live a life where religious trauma doesn’t keep you from experiencing a life filled with safety and meaningful relationships that you actually get to choose.
What Happens During Religious Trauma Treatment
After finding a therapist who specializes in religious trauma (through a directory like Reclamation Collective), you’ll schedule a consultation to decide if it makes sense to move forward with that particular therapist. Once you decide to move forward, you’ll begin meeting and working toward your unique goals for therapy.
The therapist you work with will likely gather some background information about what your experience was like in your particular religion, how it’s affected different areas of your life, and what you’d like to see change.
Depending on your therapist’s background, education, and training, they might offer specific approaches to therapy. In my own practice for instance, I offer Brainspotting and parts work, both of which are suited to help people process trauma without having to explain every painful memory in detail.
Many of my own clients are folks who also want to develop a spiritual practice that does not recreate the harm they experienced within their former religion. I help folks identify what spiritually means to them in this stage of their life so they can develop spiritual practices that are an extension of their own values.
What You Might Experience As You Go Through Religious Trauma Treatment
Whether you’ve been to therapy before, or are thinking about attending for the first time, it’s common to feel nervous at different points in the process. You might be worried that you need to remember every single detail of what you experienced, or be fearful that your therapist is going to negatively judge you.
You might also experience discomfort that can show up as feelings of anxiety, anger, or depression (just to name a few) as you work through your religious trauma in therapy. If you’re familiar with the phrase, “sometimes it gets worse before it gets better,” this is that principle in action.
A therapist who’s the right fit for you will be mindful of this and work with you to make sure that the pacing of therapy isn’t overwhelming you too much. Working through the backlog of emotions that you weren’t able to fully feel while you were still part of the religion is often part of building a life where you don’t have to compartmentalize so much of your life.
How Do You Tell if Religious Trauma Treatment is Working?
With the right therapist, religious trauma treatment isn’t all doom and gloom. In fact, one of the first things I’ve seen my own clients notice during therapy is that they start to realize that what happened to them wasn’t their fault.
Instead of shaming themselves for experiencing religious trauma, they start to appropriately direct their feelings of anger at the person (or people) who used religion to hurt them. From that anger, a motivation to live life on their own terms is often born.
When you experience this new lease on life for yourself, you might notice yourself doing things like:
Speaking up for yourself in situations where you’d normally assume that the other person knows better than you
Advocating on behalf of others when you notice they’re being misled by a perceived authority figure
Learning about religious trauma and cultic tactics to better understand how you were manipulated in the past and how to spot the warning signs (books like A Little Bit Culty by Sarah Edmondson and Nippy Ames along with Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell are great for this).
Trying new activities just for your own enjoyment
Put an entirely different way, you might notice that you participate in your own life more fully. You say “yes” to the things that interest you, or that you feel curious about, and “no” to the things that might move you away from your values or potentially harm you.
Now That You Know What Religious Trauma Treatment Is…
You also know that you have options! If you’re in the headspace where you’re curious about attending therapy, I highly recommend using the Reclamation Collective’s directory to find a therapist who’s licensed to practice where you live.
If you happen to live in Colorado or Oregon, I’d be honored to personally support you! I provide virtual Religious Trauma Therapy via video to adults located in either state. Start by booking a consultation!
Works Cited
Singh, S., Yadav, A. K., Chauhan, V. S., & Agrawal, M. (2024). Religious trauma syndrome: The futile fate of faith. Industrial psychiatry journal, 33(Suppl 1), S309–S310. https://doi.org/10.4103/ipj.ipj_87_24
