How Do I Know If I Have Religious Trauma?

Back when I was experiencing religious trauma, I didn’t even know that was a thing. I didn’t know that religious leaders could misuse their power in abusive ways largely because I always had assumed that they weren’t or wouldn’t. It was a kind of trust that you gave to people because you thought they were safe. I had been part of the evangelical community for most of my life, and had experienced things that made me uncomfortable, things that I didn’t appreciate, and things that hurt me. So when did it turn into “trauma”?

In order to understand religious trauma, you have to understand trauma itself.

Many people believe that trauma is something extreme that happens in the context of an event. War. A car accident. Sexual violation. While those things can be traumatic, not all trauma is that large. What researchers like Bessel Van Der Kolk, Peter Levine, Stephen Porges, and Judith Herman have pointed to is that trauma is a “subjective, perceptive, and physiological response to a person, place, or thing that overwhelms the nervous systems natural capacity to cope.” (Anderson, p. 26)

Subjective. Trauma is subjective to what happens in our own nervous system.

Crazy right?! This means that trauma isn’t the event — it’s the experience going on inside of our bodies. It’s a real or perceived threat that triggered something that felt too much and made us feel wildly unsafe.

Let’s come back to religious trauma.

According to Dr. Laura Anderson, author of When Religion Hurts You, many people confuse religious abuse with religious trauma. I know I have confused the two. Just because someone has experienced religious abuse doesn’t mean that they feel traumatized by that abuse. When does it cross over?

The answer is that it depends.

She believes that religious trauma fits into a category known as complex-trauma: an experience of consistent and pervasive threat or overwhelm without being able to escape.

I entered the world of church at age seven. I was enrolled in AWANA which is a child discipleship program where you had to memorize Scripture, play games, and participate in worship. I attended church twice a week with my parents listening to sermons about prophecy, prayer, hell, salvation, etc. As a teenager I went to youth group where the whole thing was replicated for teens. I was on the leadership team of my youth group which meant I had to show up at meetings, go to conferences, and be held to a certain standard of conduct. I went to Christian school where my entire education was focused on learning from a Christian context. I still had to memorize Scripture and go to chapel where we listened to sermons and did prayer and worship. Oddly enough — none of this was particularly abusive or traumatizing for me.

That came later.

It was when I started going to a church that I consider a high-control religious environment. This is essentially an religious environment that demands obedience to authority, discourages questioning, expects subservience or loyalty, controls how relationships are formed and managed, group conformity was encouraged for the sake of “unity”, and systematically groomed us through thought control and behavior modification. The demands on those who went there were high. There was high accountability for you and very little accountability for leadership.

I joined a discipleship school at this church called The Master’s Commission. It was a year-long program where every part of your life was dedicated to what you were doing. You couldn’t work — you had to raise support money from others to live. You lived full time with a host family and had to adhere to their rules for their home life. You were required to be “on-call” six days a week with one day off for rest. That day of rest would be taken up, however, if you obtained consequences for not accomplishing the myriad of things you were required to do. It’s a whole story of it’s own.

This is where things became both abusive and traumatic for me. I was so immersed and indoctrinated to obey that I didn’t feel like I could leave. Even when things felt deeply wrong or that I was asked to do things I didn’t agree with, I didn’t feel I could leave or say no. No escape.

Over time, when I wasn’t able to escape the pervasive sense of threat, I became overwhelmed, numb, fearful, and rigid. I had been in that space for so long and so often that when it was finally over I had all of these strange reactions that I didn’t understand. Sometimes the feeling of panic would hit me when I was heading to church on a Sunday. Other times I would have a massive feeling that I needed to flee when someone started praying. If I got asked to meet with a pastor for whatever reason, I felt such great fear about what I did wrong and what the consequence would be, and ultimately I had no idea who I was outside of the system which was wildly unsettling.

Trauma was happening in me and I didn’t have control over it. This is where it went from being a religious experience with some wounding to overt religious trauma. It took many years of therapy and deconstruction to work all of that out, and its what led me to becoming a religious trauma therapist. Going through a religious trauma journey shouldn’t be done alone. Helping others through such a disorienting experience is a rewarding experience, and is the heart of the work I do.

If you want to work through any part of your religious experience whether it be church hurt, religious trauma, faith deconstruction, etc. I’d love to work with you. Contact me for more more information.