Overlooked Signs of Religious Trauma

The Catholic church sex abuse scandal. The Southern Baptist convention sex abuse scandal. Jehovah’s Witness ‘two-witness’ rule that protects abusers. Shiny Happy People. There are a lot (seriously, so many) of abuse scandals connected to organized religion, just this week alone I found 10 different stories of abuse and/or child porn arrests of pastors made in the US alone. In just the past week. So this is, obviously, a major problem, a problem we’re honestly not really confronting enough at all. But an even more alarming reality is that most abuse doesn’t get a Netflix documentary about it. Not all high-control religions are considered cults, and a lot of the abuse that people are suffering through flies under the radar, even of mental health professionals.

            One of the most insidious ways that organized religions are doing regular harm is by teaching people not to trust their bodies. Sex is bad. Pleasure is wrong. Experimenting isn’t learning, but rather a slippery slope. But convincing people not to trust their own bodies, and its innate warning system in the central nervous system, opens those same people to ignoring signs that abuse and harm are happening. Overlay this with a rigid hierarchy or dogmatic teaching about what is right and what is sinful, this inability to check our own internal systems leaves us open to manipulation. You can’t trust yourself, but you can trust this leader, he was appointed by a miraculous sign! And even once people leave high control religious groups, the central nervous system doesn't flip back on like a light switch. People are always on alert (hypersensitive) and on guard for trials, temptations, or some perceived failure to be enough, or they are numb to any danger at all (hyposensitive) and struggle to find their own sense of intuition without an external force telling them. Some people get the tricky paradox of being both hyper and hyposensitive, so it can be doubly difficult to build your trust in yourself back up.

            Another subtle way that religions are indoctrinating people with harmful messaging is known as spiritual bypassing. That’s where you slap a phrase, scriptural passage, or spiritual mantra onto problems to avoid doing any emotional or relational work. “Let go and let god” or “god works in mysterious ways” or “thoughts and prayers” give people the idea of having done something meaningful to help a problem (like give an all-powerful deity a reminder to use their powers for good?), but all they have done is what we call in the therapy biz “thought stopping.” Thought stopping had a moment in therapy as a technique in early Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Basically, the idea was to interrupt the “negative” thought by saying “stop” or using some physical interruption, like snapping a rubber band on your wrist. Actually though, what was proven by research, is that thought stopping doesn’t work, and trying to restrict thought patterns actually make them more frequent. Simply put, if I say “don’t think of pink elephants,” you definitely start thinking about pink elephants even when you weren’t before. So, this has been abandoned as a therapeutic technique (we do mindfulness, acceptance, and redirects now, hooray!). But the church, not so fast to follow science. Because, if you’re selling a savior, you need people to think they need saving. So, a technique that promises to help but actually makes these thoughts happen more frequently is great! You’re a bad sinner, you better not think those bad sinful thoughts actually make you need the church and their chosen savior even more! It’s a baller business model, just y’know, pretty evil in that it is explicitly harmful. And again, this just isn’t something that goes away when you switch churches. This behavior becomes ingrained (especially if it is indoctrinated at a young age), and can be a lot of work to unlearn and replace with healthier behaviors.

            In the US of A, I will also just note that organized religions are also working hard to take people’s rights away, and are overly pushing for a theocracy. This isn’t even tinfoil hat stuff, the Speaker of the House is a member of the New Apostolic Reform (NAR, same as Minnesota political assassin Vance Boelter!) that teaches that christians should take dominion over everyone else. Fun! Roe v Wade being overturned was the religious right’s big political movement (only after school segregation stopped being a winning route for them, looking at you Jerry Falwell) and after much Panglossian denial from commentators, here we are. It’s pretty much daily triggering of religious trauma in the political sphere right now, from the Heritage Foundation stacking the Supreme Court to christofascists being appointed cabinet roles, it’s a wild ride if you’re paying attention. And for those of us who grew up and left high control churches, it’s following an unfortunately all too familiar playbook where awful things get ignored and people in power are never held accountable.

            Wowee. What a fun guest blog. I’m sure Tracy and Polly are thrilled they asked me to write this. But f’real, there are good things going on, too. First, just a post like this gets to exist? We weren’t talking about religious trauma much in the 90s and early 00s, so the awareness has increased, and so have the number of professionals who are trained to work with this stuff (hi, it’s me!). Church attendance is on the decline, and religiosity of the younger generation is also an all time low, which means there is some accountability at least in that people don’t want to be a part of harmful structures anymore. But yeah, lots of not good stuff still, hence all the culty abuse documentaries about mainstream groups. We’ve got resources though, a bunch of them! Looking for therapists who work with religious trauma, head over to Reclamation Collective and check out their directory. Looking for a therapist who won’t do spiritual bypassing, go check out Secular Therapy Project and their related resources at Recovering From Religion. And then there’s lil’ ol’ me, I’m the Jer in Wellness with Jer where I blog and have even more resources. You can also find me on YouTube and Instagram. I also host the Your Therapist Needs Therapy podcast, you can listen to me talk about mental health, ADHD/ASD, religious trauma, and lots of other things wherever you get your podcasts!