Religious Trauma

Religious experiences and beliefs can be powerful and shape our entire lives. Trauma in those contexts are unique and often overlooked. Revitalize Wellness Counseling knows that it can sometimes be difficult to find providers who understand religious cultural backgrounds and how that may have played a role in your life currently or in the past. Revitalize Wellness Counseling is committed to approach therapy from a culturally competent place in order to help you heal spiritual wounds and/ or restructure your life after religious abuse.

Revitalize Wellness Counseling is familiar with members and former members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and has an understanding of unique aspects within the spectrums of Mormonism—in addition to working with Evangelical backgrounds, Jehovah Witness, other Christian denominations, and fundamentalist theologies. Revitalize Wellness Counseling works with clients throughout religious spectrums, including backgrounds of non-Christian religions, high demand groups, and secular/ non-religious backgrounds. Some ways religious trauma is addressed is through helping clients identify their values and personal beliefs, working through shame, spiritual abuse, and rigid thinking (including scrupulosity), improving sexual health and working through harms from purity culture, developing boundaries, and grief work from loss of identity or relationships to religious friends/family.

  • Religious trauma is the physical, emotional, or psychological response to religious beliefs, practices, or structures that overwhelm an individual’s ability to cope and return to a sense of safety.

  • AREs is an umbrella term for any experience of a religious belief, practice, or structure that undermines an individual’s sense of safety or autonomy and/or negatively impacts their physical, social, emotional, relational, or psychological well-being.

    Adverse religious experiences can result in religious trauma, but the terms are not interchangeable and some AREs do not result in religious trauma. Rather, it is a broad term that captures a wide-range of negative experiences, some of which may result in religious trauma. It is also common for adverse religious experience to impact individuals in other ways, including physically, sexually, emotionally, and can sometimes present as anxiety, depression, etc.

  • Spiritual Abuse is the use of power, conscious or unconscious, to direct, control, or manipulate a person’s body, thoughts, emotions, or actions. This use of power takes away a person’s capacity for choice, freedom, or autonomy of self, within a spiritual or religious context.

  • Faith deconstruction can be defined as the process of taking apart and examining an idea, tradition, practice, or belief in order to determine its truthfulness and usefulness.

  • A faith crisis is a painful experience in life when an individual begins to doubt their deeply held beliefs, often resulting in grief and confusion for the individual, as well as a sense of disconnection from God. Sometimes a faith crisis is also referred to as a “dark night of the soul.”

  • A faith transition often (but not always) follows a faith crisis, where an individual undergoes a change in belief and is in the process of challenging and changing previously held belief systems.

    Sometimes it is assumed that this phase means someone is leaving a religion or organization; while that is true for some, it is not always the case—sometimes it could just mean redefining faith without changing group (organization/ family) dynamics.

  • High demand or high control groups can be defined as social environments that are relationally and ideologically extreme. Members are often coercively influenced through systems of psychosocial control and influence.

If you’re ready to find healing from adverse religious experiences, contact to set up a consultation.