Religious trauma does not always announce itself through spectacle or cruelty. More often, it arrives quietly. Through silence. Through delay. Through care that exists in theory, but never materializes when it is needed most.

I am writing this because religious trauma is not rare, and it is not abstract. It reshapes how people experience safety and belonging, and even how they relate to their own inner world. It fragments identity. It teaches people to distrust their instincts. It leaves many searching for a sense of home long after they leave the walls of a church.

In my practice, I meet many patients who, like me, have been affected by religious trauma and spiritual abuse. This is part of my story, and some of the lessons I have learned.

Fragmentation of identity and self-alienation

To survive inside unsafe religious systems, people often learn to split themselves.

One part remains visible and acceptable. Articulate. Thoughtful. Theologically fluent. Faithful. Another part learns to stay quiet. The part carrying grief, confusion, anger, longing, or unmet need retreats inward. Over time, this split starts feeling like reality.

I learned, slowly, which parts of me were “right” or “sanctified” and which were not. I learned to translate my inner world into language acceptable to others. Eventually, I stopped trusting my internal signals. Desire became suspicious. Pain became inconvenient. Honesty felt dangerous. What mattered was how I was acting. After all, changed behaviors were framed as the fruit of the Spirit, and behavior was what the community evaluated.

This kind of fragmentation is not weakness. It is adaptation. When authenticity threatens belonging, the nervous system learns how to survive.

The cost is self-alienation. You begin to live at a distance from yourself. You stop asking what you feel and start asking what is “right” to say or believe.

Attachment injury inside religious systems

Churches are not only places of shared belief. They function as attachment systems.

For many people, especially those who enter faith communities young or vulnerable, religious leaders and institutions become sources of safety, care, and moral orientation. When harm happens inside this system, it rarely lands as a mere disagreement. It lands as abandonment.

I asked for help. Clearly. Repeatedly. Over months. I named pain. I asked for care. I asked for conversation. What followed was not support, but silence, delay, and deflection.

At one point, an elder told me I did not have a right to be hurt.

My mind heard words. My body heard something else entirely: your feelings are illegitimate here. Your pain is a problem.

Attachment systems respond to abandonment with urgency. When care is withheld by people who claim shepherding roles, the nervous system does not interpret this as neutral. It registers danger. The message internalizes quickly: I am unsafe to need.

Dissociation from the internal world

When pain cannot be acknowledged safely, people learn to numb it.

I kept functioning. From the outside, nothing dramatic appeared to be happening. I showed up. I worked. I stayed composed. Inside, something was eroding. Emotions dulled. Sensations flattened. Hope narrowed. God felt more distant.

Religious language often reinforces this survival strategy. Endurance becomes virtue. Silent suffering becomes maturity. Grief becomes spiritual weakness. People learn to override the body in service of being “faithful” to the “truth” they desperately want to believe.

This is dissociation. Not the dramatic kind shown in movies, but the quiet kind. A slow disconnection from the internal felt world, even though that inner world is part of our humanity.

Eventually, the nervous system reaches its limit. Collapse is not failure. It is the body refusing to hold what no one else will carry.

Numbing until collapse

For a long time, I tried to normalize the damage.

I told myself this was temporary. I told myself God was working. I told myself I needed to trust God in this. I believed if I stayed patient, care would come. I convinced myself silence meant busyness, not disregard. I continued to function while cracks widened underneath.

This pattern is common in religious trauma. People stay long past the point of safety because leaving can feel like losing identity, community, and meaning all at once. They tell themselves they are being faithful when, in reality, they are surviving.

Eventually, the cost becomes too high. The internal world demands attention. Something breaks through the numbness. Often, people reach out one last time.

When that final reach is met with moralized dismissal, the injury deepens.

The violation of promised care

The deepest wound in religious trauma often comes from betrayal.

I believed this community would help me find peace, connection, love, and care. Instead, responsibility was deflected. Harm was denied. My pain was reframed as personal failure. There was no accountability. No curiosity. No attempt at repair.

Being harmed by something you believed would make you whole carries a unique kind of devastation. It destabilizes trust not only in people, but in goodness itself.

When institutions refuse accountability, the burden shifts to the injured person. The system remains intact. The person absorbs the damage. Human dignity erodes quietly.

This is moral injury. Not only pain, but the collapse of trust in what was supposed to be safe.

Silence, dismissal, and institutional power

Eventually, I received a formal letter dismissing me from membership. Letter of Dismissal It was written in calm religious language. It invoked scripture and church “discipline.” It encouraged repentance. It offered to meet, yet under conditions the elders themselves refused to create.

There was no meaningful process. Nothing like what was outlined in the church constitution for this kind of ostracization from membership. The church was not bound by what it held out as obligatory for everyone else. I, however, was accused of failing to follow a process church leadership did not follow.

On paper, it sounded “right.” In reality, it formalized what had already happened relationally.

I had been abandoned long before the letter arrived.

This is how institutional power often works in religious settings: civility without care. Spiritual language without relational presence. Process without protection for the vulnerable.

It leaves people questioning their own reality. If everything is written so calmly, maybe the harm was imagined. If leaders say peace, maybe pain is rebellion.

This confusion is not accidental. It is part of how systems protect themselves.

Losing home

Leaving was not dramatic. It was a slow realization there was no place for me there.

Community existed on Sundays, not in suffering. Care was conditional. Belonging required silence. Sexuality felt dangerous to name. There was no language allowed for my lived experience.

What hurt most was noticing where care actually showed up. Friends outside the church. Colleagues. People with no spiritual authority offered more tangible support than those tasked “by God” with shepherding souls.

Loss like this carries a quiet grief. There is no ritual for spiritual exile. No funeral for the version of life you were promised if you remained faithful enough.

Just disorientation. And the unsettling question: where do I belong now?

Looking for home beyond the walls

Eventually, survival required leaving.

Not to reject goodness, but to find it again. Not to abandon faith, but to protect what remained human inside me.

Looking for home beyond the walls meant relearning safety. Letting grief exist without correction. Allowing anger without moralization. Naming harm without apology.

Belonging began to feel different. Less performative. Less conditional. More honest.

I learned something simple and profound: love does not require self-erasure.

Why this story matters

Religious trauma is not healed through debate, denial, or spiritual platitudes. Healing requires accountability, repair, and the restoration of dignity.

This story is not shared to attack faith or religious community. It is shared to name what happens when care is withheld and harm is ignored inside systems claiming divine authority.

If churches want to be places of healing, they must learn to listen without defensiveness, respond without conditions, and protect the humanity of people who come wounded.

In later posts, I will explore specific steps toward healing. This post is meant to name the problem, define it, and help survivors feel less alone. We can make sense of this trauma. We can learn how it formed, how it lives in the body, and how it begins to loosen.

If you see yourself in this

If parts of this story feel familiar, you are not broken, weak, or failing at faith. What you may be experiencing are normal human responses to prolonged relational harm inside a system that was supposed to offer care.

You are allowed to feel confused. You are allowed to grieve. You are allowed to name harm without rushing toward forgiveness, reconciliation, or certainty. You are allowed to take your time.

If reading this brings up distress, you do not have to carry it alone.

If you are in the U.S. and need immediate support, you can call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. It is available 24/7 and does not require you to be suicidal to reach out.
If you are LGBTQ+ or questioning, you can contact The Trevor Project by calling 866-488-7386, texting START to 678678, or chatting online. They provide confidential support around identity, isolation, and crisis.
If you are outside the U.S., you can find international crisis resources at findahelpline.com, which lists local options by country.

Reaching out for support does not mean something is wrong with you. It means something mattered, and it hurt.

In later posts, I will explore specific paths toward healing from religious trauma. This post is meant to name the problem, give language to experiences many people carry in silence, and remind you that what you went through is real, understandable, and shared by others.

Healing is possible. And you do not have to do it alone.

References

Betrayal, attachment, and trauma

Bowlby, J. (1988). A secure base: Parent-child attachment and healthy human development. Basic Books.

Freyd, J. J. (1996). Betrayal trauma: The logic of forgetting childhood abuse. Harvard University Press.

Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence from domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books.

Herman, J. L. (2015). Trauma and recovery after betrayal. APA PsycNet. https://doi.org/10.1037/tra0000001

Religious trauma, spiritual abuse, and harm

Doehring, C. (2015). The practice of pastoral care: A postmodern approach. Westminster John Knox Press.

Doehring, C. (2021). Religious trauma: Theory, research, and clinical implications. Journal of Pastoral Theology, 31(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/10649867.2021.1904885

Koch, J. R., Exline, J. J., & Park, C. L. (2022). Development of the Spiritual Harm and Abuse Scale. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 50(2), 123–138. https://doi.org/10.1177/00916471211068330

Oakley, L., & Humphreys, J. (2019). Escaping the maze of spiritual abuse. SPCK Publishing.

Purcell, N., & McCarthy, S. (2022). Spiritual abuse as trauma: A systematic review. Spirituality in Clinical Practice, 9(4), 255–270. https://doi.org/10.1037/scp0000289

Winell, M. (2011). Religious trauma syndrome: It’s time to recognize it. Journal of Religion and Health, 50(3), 628–634. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-011-9466-1

Dissociation, fragmentation, and nervous system responses

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

Ogden, P., Minton, K., & Pain, C. (2006). Trauma and the body: A sensorimotor approach to psychotherapy. W. W. Norton & Company.

Putnam, F. W. (1997). Dissociation in children and adolescents: A developmental perspective. Guilford Press.

Moral injury and institutional betrayal

Litz, B. T., Stein, N., Delaney, E., Lebowitz, L., Nash, W. P., Silva, C., & Maguen, S. (2009). Moral injury and moral repair in war veterans. Clinical Psychology Review, 29(8), 695–706. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2009.07.003

Smith, C. P., & Freyd, J. J. (2014). Institutional betrayal. American Psychologist, 69(6), 575–587. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037564

Jones, S. L., & Doehring, C. (2023). When God hurts: Religious trauma as epistemic and moral injury. Journal of Pastoral Theology, 33(2), 85–101. https://doi.org/10.1080/10649867.2023.2181234

Minority stress, sexuality, and religious harm

Meyer, I. H. (2003). Prejudice, social stress, and mental health in lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations. Psychological Bulletin, 129(5), 674–697. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.129.5.674

Rodriguez, E. M., & Ouellette, S. C. (2000). Gay and lesbian Christians: Homosexual and religious identity integration in the members and participants of a gay-positive church. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 39(3), 333–347.

Senger, A. R., & Vázquez, L. (2024). Religious experiences, expectations of discrimination, and distress among LGBTQ Christians. Journal of Religion and Health, 63(1), 45–62. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-023-01789-4

Religious struggle, shame, and internalized harm

Exline, J. J., Pargament, K. I., Grubbs, J. B., & Yali, A. M. (2014). The Religious and Spiritual Struggles Scale: Development and initial validation. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 6(3), 208–222. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036469

Jones, S. L., & Doehring, C. (2023). Fear of God, fear of sin, and scrupulosity as trauma responses. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 36(2), 311–321. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.22845

Naming Religious Trauma: When Church Becomes Unsafe