Therapy Helps Heal Religious Trauma By Unconditional Acceptance
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I am not interested in trying to sell you on my services. I want to support you in connecting with and trusting your insides. If it feels right to you to reach out to me, please do so and we can schedule a consultation.
I have worked with religious trauma in various forms throughout my career. It is much more complex than this short web-page really addresses. However, I’d like you to know that through awareness and compassion healing is possible, one step at a time.
If you’ve been hurt by religion, whether by the doctrine, the community, or individuals therein you can heal.
So many individuals have had deeply painful experiences in the context of religion. For some this is due to rigid, black-or-white indoctrination which requires suppression of emotional states, and disconnection from true self. Others may have experienced more outright forms of abuse by family members, clergy, or high-ranking officials.
When one experiences abuse in this context it can be tremendously life-damaging. What is supposed to be a source of upliftment, becomes a source of torment. Authoritarian power structures serve to perpetuate the cycle of judgment and shame, leading to further self-doubt and disconnection.
Religious Trauma is characterized by shame and idealization.
This can result in a constant fixation on judgment and the sense of being watched. To be sure, there are often other psychological dynamics in play. Denial, repression, disavowal, projection, dissociation, are likely involved. However, rigid indoctrination is energized by shame and enacted by idealization.
Shame is what is utilized emotionally to condition one into “what is good, and what is bad.” The more rigid these categories, the greater intensity of threat and shame. This kind of shame happens when we internalize that something about our experience that we can not control makes us bad as individuals. Shame becomes an emotional/affective experience of feeling over exposed and wanting to disappear. Very often this kind of shame turns into self-loathing, dissociation and/or a freeze response.
Idealization is when we imagine that there is an all-good, perfect other who is above reproach. One attempts to emulate that other and therefore to create an ideal self-image to which one constantly is judging oneself against. While this can serve a healthy function in the appropriate context, very often it becomes distorted and damaging when unconscious. In this case, idealization creates tremendous internal tension, and pulls in shame which through repetition turns into self-loathing. The idealized other in the context of authoritarian religious communities becomes a person of power and privilege. If they have not learn to accept all of themselves, they will most likely enact that lack of acceptance through rejection, judgment, shame, and threats of damnation (or similar) towards other members of the group. This is a classic example of projection. What we can’t tolerate in ourselves, we can’t tolerate in someone else.
How Therapy Can Help
You may be breaking some rules by talking to a therapist. It takes tremendous courage to break rules if we come from this kind of indoctrination. Yet, one who comes from this background needs someone to model for them what acceptance really looks and feels like. This is baseline of what therapy can offer you.
Trauma-informed therapy can also help you learn how to relate to the parts of yourself that have been cast aside with compassion. You can learn to understand dissociative states, disavowal of emotions, and learn to bring loving attention towards yourself. You can learn to identify when you are caught in the old shame conditioning, and begin to loosen the grip of shame on you. You can begin to define your identity outside of rigidity. You can decide how you want to approach your spiritual life on terms that feel right to you. You can experience direct and healing states of consciousness that are totally unrelated to black-and-white indoctrination. You can begin to heal the divided places inside, and cast-aside self-loathing.