What Causes Religious Trauma?
What is religious trauma?
Religious trauma is any sort of traumatic experience that happens within religious or spiritual spaces. This can include coercion, emotional manipulation, fear-mongering, as well as physical, sexual, or emotional abuse. You can read our full blog on religious trauma here.
What causes religious trauma?
Religious communities should be our safest emotional and physical spaces. These groups often talk about creating safety and salvation for those seeking such, but these spaces can quickly become toxic, abusive, and traumatizing.
4 causes of religious trauma:
This list is not extensive, but it will give you an idea of some of the trauma and abuse that can happen within religious groups where people feel disempowered, stuck, overwhelmed, and unable to leave. Each of these examples is awful and causes significant emotional distress and traumatic responses in those within these powerful communities. Here are four different causes of religious trauma.
➕ COERCION: This type of abuse attempts to persuade someone to do something by force or threat. Religious communities often have messages that all are welcome within the safe walls of the temple, church, or sacred space. But it’s important to look at the behaviors or unspoken messages the members receive about their emotions, their expression, or their behaviors. Here are some common examples of coercion:
Threats to lose contact with your family
Threats of hell or eternal damnation
Threats of punishment if you behave differently than what you are instructed by leaders or religious staff
Threats to lose your job, especially if your job/business functions with a religious purpose
Threats to lose your customers, especially if your customers are from a religious community or base (or can be influenced by coercive leaders.)
➕ EMOTIONAL MANIPULATION: This type of abuse is less obvious at first, but it can be incredibly traumatic over time. Emotional manipulation is any attempt to influence or exert power over someone else through tactics of deception or exploitation. In religious spaces, this can mean exerting power over the vulnerable or less powerful people in the congregation or group. Gaslighting and guilting the community members is a big red flag of emotional manipulation. Leaders that speak often about their beliefs, but their behaviors fail to match their stated beliefs are often actively emotionally manipulating congregants. Here are some examples of emotional manipulation:
Guilting group members into giving over their time, resources, or finances for the “overall good” of the religion.
Passive aggression when members express boundaries: “I guess you don’t want to serve God’s people.”
“You read into everything. You’re crazy” or any other version of gaslighting.
Grooming or preparing group members for increasing their commitment to the church slowly over time. This goes unnoticed by most folks and creates helplessness when people discover that they are “in too deep” and feel they cannot extract themselves without serious consequences.
Making promises that no one could actually keep.
➕ FEAR-MONGERING: This is a tactic used to scare people into submission or agreement. Fear is a powerful agent for manipulating large groups of people. When used within religious communities, fear is often used to scare people into behaving in an approved way. Fear can become especially traumatic when folks believe that god or their higher power will punish, spite, reject or judge them if they don’t follow the “rules” that the leaders of the religion have given. Here are some examples of fear-mongering in religious settings:
Leads followers to believe that God will not be happy with them if they do not behave in certain ways
Confusing fear for love. You might hear someone say “I love you too much to let you (name some ‘sin’)”.
Being taught there are eternal negative consequences for being human.
➕ PHYSICAL OR SEXUAL ABUSE: There is so much abuse that goes on behind the closed door of religious settings. Why does it persist? There’s usually some mix of repression (you can’t feel certain feelings or express human sexuality) and power dynamics (pastor with a congregant) that creates a dangerous setting where horrific abuse can happen.
Setting meetings behind closed doors and using the privacy to abuse someone.
Requiring sexual servitude and stating “This is god’s will”.
Physical outbursts or threats of violence to those that do not follow the rules.
Calling violent expressions of anger “righteous indignation”.
Final thoughts
As you continue educating yourself on religious trauma and abuse, it’s important to remember that you are not alone. If you read through this list and felt a pang of recognition of the causes of religious trauma, we also suggest two action steps:
Get some education on trauma in religious settings. We offer an accessible monthly membership that teaches you all about religious trauma and how to recover from this abuse. Join us at A Year of Non-Magical Thinking to start uncovering the religious trauma you experienced.
Get some support. This requires some extra steps as you make sense of difficult and upsetting events. We offer 1:1 Intensive Coaching for Religious Trauma Survivors or Family Members, as well as a Religious Trauma Support Group. Both are excellent ways to get support and helpful feedback about your particular experience.
If you need a mental health professional to help you better understand gaslighting and its impact on relationships, you can sign up for a free 30-minute consultation with our therapist matchmaker to see what therapist might be the best fit for you. (California residents only).
If you are a religious trauma survivor and you’d like a low-key and no-pressure environment to learn more about what happened to you and how you can heal, you can sign up for A Year of Non-Magical Thinking here.
If you are not a resident of California but would still like the support of a trauma specialist, you can sign up for coaching here.