EMDR for Religious Trauma
Religious trauma can have a lasting and insidious effect on your relational, emotional, and physical well-being. We seek spirituality and religion for community, comfort, support, and connection. When those religious environments become abusive, coercive, and traumatizing, we typically feel like we have nowhere to turn.
We know that trauma is stored in our bodies. We also know that when we experience a traumatic event and it goes unprocessed, our brains will tell us that we are currently experiencing another trauma when we are triggered. That means you might be completely safe at the moment, but your brain thinks you’re experiencing trauma and will go into survival mode in order to try to keep you safe.
This is incredibly disruptive to life. It’s hard to figure out what is actually safe, why you are experiencing the feelings that are coming up, and how to navigate through the internal chaos. EMDR was developed as an evidence-based treatment for trauma that has gone unprocessed. You can read more about the basics of EMDR here. When it comes to religious trauma, EMDR can offer meaningful relief after years of triggers, overwhelm, and a dysregulated nervous system.
Here are some of the ways that EMDR can help with religious trauma:
Make sense of experiences that are too hard to talk or think about. Let’s face it, there’s a complicated relationship that most religions have with emotions and feelings. We tend to hear years (or even decades) of lessons about emotions being dangerous, evil, or the beginning of a slippery slope away from god. Then trauma happens and our whole mind and body are screaming with emotions, but we’ve never been taught how to deal with feelings. So we make it our full-time job to try to avoid our feelings and reminders of our trauma. EMDR offers a safe space with a trained professional to slowly acknowledge and process the memories or experiences that have felt too overwhelming or terrifying to face alone.
Uses brain-based processing, rather than having to rely on making overly spiritual meaning of trauma. Sometimes when we experience religious trauma, we find ourselves resistant to going back to any forced spirituality. We might have felt pressured by our previous communities to forgive, get over, or tell ourselves that god “had a plan” for our trauma. This spiritual bypassing can cause additional emotional suffering on top of the trauma you’ve already experienced. Taking a science-backed and brain-based approach might relieve you from having to make spiritual meaning of horrifying events.
EMDR helps you find internal and external resourcing. When we experience trauma inside our religious communities, we find ourselves in a bind. Should we continue to lean into the support of the community so we feel less lonely? Or should we back away from the community that has looked away or ignored abuse and trauma inside its walls? That’s a lonely and overwhelming space to be! Part of EMDR treatment is called resourcing. That’s simply the careful and thoughtful planning between you and your therapist to create helpful internal and external resources. This can be incredibly helpful in seasons when you feel abandoned or rejected by a community that hurt you.
If you are looking for ways to get both education and support, we’ve created our no-pressure community led by a clinical psychologist that specializes in religious trauma and cult recovery. You can read more about and register for A Year of Non-Magical Thinking here.
Did this ring true for you? Looking for a therapist who specializes in EMDR & Religious Trauma? Our therapists can help. Book a therapy matchmaking appointment with our therapist matchmaker to begin your healing journey today. (Therapy is only available in CA.)
Interested in learning more about our unique approach to trauma therapy?
These blogs talk more about the basics of EMDR:
You can read more about Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy here: