Religious Trauma & Spiritual Abuse
One of our main specialties at NobleTree Therapy is working with people who have experienced adverse religious experiences, including religious trauma and spiritual abuse.
NobleTree founder and co-founder of the Reclamation Collective, Kendra Snyder, along with her colleagues from the Religious Trauma Institute and the Reclamation Collective have defined key terms related to adverse religious experiences, religious trauma, and spiritual abuse as follows:
+ Adverse Religious Experiences (AREs)
AREs can be any experience of a faith or religious practice, belief, or structure that undermines an individual’s sense of safety, autonomy, and/or causes negative impacts. AREs can impact the physical, social, emotional, relational, or psychological well-being of a person.
This is used as an umbrella term to encompass the harmful and impactful experiences people may endure, that they personally may not identify as religious trauma or spiritual abuse.
+ Religious Trauma
Religious Trauma is the body’s response to religious beliefs, practices, or structures that overpower a person’s ability to cope and return to a sense of safety. These responses can be physical, emotional, or psychological.
+ Spiritual Abuse
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.
Religious Trauma and How We Can Help
The impacts of religious trauma can be far-reaching and extensive. Religious trauma can affect a person’s identity, experience of relationships, and the world.
At NobleTree Therapy, we help you develop a comprehensive understanding of your story. We’ll validate the intensity and complexity of your experience, as well as honor the bravery it took to seek help as a survivor of religious trauma.
We recognize that there’s so much risk involved in exploring, re-negotiating, and re-establishing a relationship with a religious or spiritual practice after experiencing religious trauma. If your whole life and identity are wrapped up in a community that is harmful, abusive, or traumatic, it can be difficult to disentangle yourself from that experience. It may feel scary or confusing. But we’re here to help you find clarity and support on your healing journey.
What we do
At NobleTree Therapy we utilize an integrated approach to supporting those impacted by religious trauma through incorporating trauma-informed care, somatic processing, existential questions, and narrative therapy elements.
We will help you to reconcile the indoctrinated messages you’ve received and how they differ from what you truly value and believe. We’ll help you make sense of the process of breaking down the foundation of who you know yourself to be, how you make sense of the world, and the aftermath of a traumatic religious experience.
Some questions we’ll explore as we support your deconstruction journey may be:
Where did this dissonance come from and how can you reconcile it?
How do you find homeostasis again after a traumatic experience?
What do you do with the grief you feel from losing your community or pieces of your identity?
We support you in both deconstruction from harmful and toxic beliefs, practices, or ideas, while creating an environment to engage in reclamation. This includes reclaiming or claiming for the first time various parts of your true identity, autonomy, pleasure, and self-expression.
Common Experiences
Often deconstructing and healing from religious trauma involves a lot of competing emotions. You left a community where you thought you belonged, even though it was at the expense of your identity and true self. There might have been a certainty, guarantee, and safety within the belief system and values.
People looking for help healing from religious trauma may experience the following:
Confusion or lack of identity
Existential fear and uncertainty
Traumatic responses to both new and familiar spaces and relationships
Longing for more sexual freedom
Experiencing incongruence or dissonance
Being a survivor of gaslighting or manipulation
Struggling to set healthy boundaries
Having a difficult time experiencing sexual pleasure
Becoming more aware of systemic oppressive, racist, and non-inclusive practices within religious communities
Through the therapeutic process of healing from religious trauma, we will support you in holding the complex nuances of your experience, emotions, and processing. Therapy for religious trauma can help create safety within yourself, make meaning of the foundation of who you consider yourself to be, and find clarity in how you want to show up in the world.
Spiritual Abuse and How We Can Help
While spiritual abuse has significant overlap with religious trauma, it is different in that it doesn’t need to occur within a faith or religious system. Spiritual abuse occurs when someone consciously or unconsciously uses power and manipulation to coerce, direct, or force people into things that compromise their autonomy and ability to consent.
Misuse of power in any relationship can cause spiritual abuse. Some examples of communities or spaces where one might experience spiritual abuse are therapeutic spaces, political environments, yogi spaces, and medicine communities, to name a few.
People who commit spiritual abuse use power to control or manipulate another person. This can look like wooing, gifting people things, building a person up to tear them down, and making a big demand or request that doesn’t allow people autonomy. Spiritual abuse compromises our ability to honor our needs, our “yes” and “no”.
At NobleTree Therapy we help you understand how the patterns of abuse were established and maintained. We’re here to help you come to a place of knowing and understanding that what happened to you isn’t your fault and there is hope in healing.
By doing the work in therapy for spiritual abuse, you’ll reclaim or claim for the first time your voice and power. We’ll deconstruct what happened and make sense of it, together. You’ll create a narrative that empowers you - restoring your sense of control, autonomy, power, and strength.
If you’re ready to reclaim your voice and find healing from religious trauma and/or spiritual abuse, contact us to set up a free consultation.
We look forward to helping you find safety in your identity.