How Do You Heal From Spiritual Abuse?

Religious trauma therapy in person in Wichita and online across Kansas

Spiritual communities: a source of great support and of great harm

What is Spiritual Abuse?

Spiritual communities should be characterized by things like mutual growth and support, but unfortunately people sometimes experience spiritual communities as a place where control supersedes care, where dogmatism chokes curiosity, where vulnerable people are exploited, and where more grace is given to perpetrators than their victims. If you have spent time in one of these communities, the wounds may be following you around in ways you’re still uncovering. Sometimes, these wounds are so severe that they generate symptoms of trauma.

If that’s the case, by the time you've started googling “spiritual abuse” or a similar term, you're probably experiencing some of these things:

• Struggling to distinguish between similar-feeling things like shame vs conscience vs manipulation

• Places, people, songs and scriptures that used to feel comforting might now trigger a panic attack

• You may be experiencing numbness or depression, feeling adrift in the world

• Alternating back and forth between being sure you're doing the right thing vs thinking you're the problem (think of the movie Tangled and Rapunzel's flip-flopping emotions on her first day out of the tower - it’s a great illustration of what this looks like!)

• Feeling a strong draw toward people in similar situations

• Experiencing bouts of rage or emotion swings

• Struggling to hold healthy boundaries

• Feeling chronically younger or older than your actual age

You might even feel all these things in a single day! These symptoms make sense after spiritual abuse.

Can Religious Trauma Cause PTSD?

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is currently defined in fairly narrow ways: a specific set of symptoms after specific events such as a sexual assault, threat of death, violence, etc. Religious trauma does not always meet the narrow parameters for an official diagnosis of PTSD (though sometimes it certainly does, including in situations like clergy sexual abuse). But I can say this: the symptoms people experience after religious trauma can nonetheless be a dead ringer for PTSD.

PTSD’s symptoms are sorted into four broad categories:

• intrusions (flashbacks, nightmares)

• avoidance (trying to stay away from triggering things)

• negative feelings and beliefs (numbness, shame, and distorted beliefs about self/others)

• a nervous system that's off kilter (hypervigilance, reckless behavior, insomnia, brain fog, irritability, etc)

In addition to those categories, if your religious trauma had an ongoing nature or was a major part of your childhood, you may also be experiencing symptoms that are sometimes classified as Complex PTSD (CPTSD), like a confused sense of who you innately are, emotional fragility, and relational struggles. (Read more about distinguishing PTSD and CPTSD here.)

If these symptoms sound familiar to you, I encourage you to seek trauma treatment, particularly if you can find a provider familiar with spiritual abuse recovery. Whether you want to walk away from faith entirely, revamp it, or remain close in belief to where you were, there is a provider out there who is a good fit for you.

What you’re experiencing is real.

And there is help available.

Church buildings can hold your best memories or your worst memories, and sometimes both simultaneously. Spiritual-related trauma is complicated like that.

Healing From Church Hurt

So, how do you heal from spiritual abuse? Everyone’s healing journey is unique, but there are some things that pop up frequently that may be helpful as you think about how to move forward in healing work:

• One of the first things you might be looking for is information, including information about your specific situation to help validate your internal sense of what happened. Often spiritual abuse involves some gaslighting and mental games, so your first task may just be to confirm to your own mind that you didn't make it up, you aren't crazy, and it really was that bad. If you don't have that kind of validation from your social circle, you might feel drawn to narratives of other people’s situations that have parallels to your experience. Some emotions of anger and outrage are common as you search for parallel stories, and I believe that can be a healthy form of anger. Anger is an emotion meant to give humans enough impetus to make big changes, including the monumental task of leaving abuse or calling for justice to be served. Anger is usually a healthy step somewhere in the recovery journey; it does not mean you have succumbed to bitterness or that you will be angry forever. This is a season.

• One of the reasons this information-gathering step is so important, is that in controlling or abusive situations, your sense of self is often eroded. It’s common to doubt your memory, feel foggy or confused, and to be unsure of what you know or what to do next. Developing a healthy sense of self can initially sound disconcerting - like you’re trying to become selfish! But the reality is that you do need a healthy level of “self” to function in life, or you end up spending a lot of energy doubting your memories, being tossed around by other people’s manipulation, and being extra vulnerable to predatory individuals. When you have a healthy level of self, you’re able to sense your needs and take care of them before they blow up on other people, you can be curious about other people’s perspectives without spiraling in self-doubt, you can trust your intuition in decision making, and you can bring more light into the world as you radiate calm confidence. A healthy level of self is a beautiful gift to the world and the people around you! So start with knowing that this is something to aim for: solidifying your sense of self.

• You need safety. It is difficult to make progress on healing symptoms of PTSD when you’re in an unsafe environment. The lack of safety keeps your nervous system revved up or collapsed (or alternating between the two), out of the zone you can do healing work in. Depending on your situation, safety can be complicated to achieve because it may involve life changes like drawing boundaries, suspending a spiritual practice, decreasing a relationship, changing jobs, etc.

  Those big moves can take time to sort out. But focus on all the small things you can do for yourself, meanwhile. Drink coffee while you watch the birds. Go for walks in a green space. Relish the hot shower. Watch a funny tv show. Learn a deep breathing practice to slow the triggered reactions. When things seem to be closing in on you, physically expand your vision to as far away as you can see, to the horizon, sky and outdoors. Spend as much time as you can looking at what is funny, beautiful, and good. Your nervous system will benefit and your capacity for things that currently dysregulate you will eventually increase again.

• A common task for people after trauma of any kind (including religious trauma) is reconnecting with the body. That may manifest in a wide range of ways from not noticing when you need to eat until you’re starving, to taking unreasonable risks because you had to tune out protective gut instincts during the trauma era, to cycles of binging and shame, and so much more. One of the tasks of healing for many people, then, is reconnecting to the body. This can take many forms, ranging from a new body-mind-breath practice or focusing on positive sensations throughout the day, all the way to somatic therapy. For now, start by noticing how connected or disconnected you are from your body, and being curious about what it would be like to be more connected.

• Be aware that a traumatized brain will veer toward simplicity: it’s very low on margin after trauma and wants to collapse everyone and everything into stark good/bad, safe/unsafe, true/untrue categories to conserve mental energy. This is a normal part of healing work, so be kind to yourself about this! But also hold some awareness that this simplified sorting does leave you somewhat vulnerable to harmful people who come packaged in ways that your brain hasn’t yet flagged as risky, or it can cause you to reject support from people who are overall safe but don’t fit neatly into the tight categories your brain is utilizing right now. So as you continue to move through stages of healing work, eventually move your brain toward increased capacity for the complexity, gray areas, and paradoxes that are all around us. But early on, this may begin with as simply as saying to yourself, “This might more complex than it feels right now. But my brain is just trying to keep me safe and my job for now is to be safe.”

Therapy for Spiritual Abuse in Wichita, KS

All of these tasks and eventually many more, are part of what trauma therapy with a focus on religious trauma can help with. Supportive, safe relationships are a critical component of healing. Paradoxically, although other people are where almost everyone receives their worst wounds, other people are also critical to healing those wounds. Therapy can provide one of those healing relationships.

If you’re in Kansas and considering therapy to help you in the journey of recovering from spiritual abuse, reach out today to schedule your free consultation. I want you to enter therapy with confidence that you’re in the place that will help you find healing!

Elizabeth Peters, LMSW is a licensed therapist seeing clients in person in Wichita and online across Kansas. She provides EMDR and somatic therapy for adults who are overwhelmed by anxiety, trauma, painful relationships or spiritual harm.