Sacrificing an entire worldview, community, and support system-which may result in trauma of its own-can be an incredibly difficult step on the road to healing. Leaving an unhealthy religious community may result in strained, damaged, or even broken relationships with friends, family, or partners.
This can be a healthy choice, but it may be disorienting for someone whose life has been controlled by a certain set of beliefs, rules, and expectations. Religious trauma may also occur when a person decides to leave their harmful or abusive religious community. So this type of trauma may stem from a lifelong message that who you are somehow puts your relationship with your god, your family, and your community at risk. Some LGBTQIA+ people, for example, grow up in conservative religious communities who believe their identity is sinful or evil. Many forms of religious trauma are not associated with specific events, but instead accumulate over a long period of time through harmful messages enforced by the community. The victim may avoid sharing their experience for fear of what it could mean for their place in the faith community. The religious community may ostracize the victim of a trauma, claiming it was somehow deserved, decreed by their god as necessary, or not that bad in the grand scheme of things.
The trauma has religious implications: The effects of the trauma are processed through the lens of a person’s religion.A person experiences a trauma: The trauma may be directly related to religion, such as sexual assault by a religious leader, or it may be indirectly related or unrelated, such as a divorce in the family.This type of trauma often unfolds over several stages: Traumatic religious experiences may harm or threaten to harm someone’s physical, emotional, mental, sexual, or spiritual health and safety. Religious trauma occurs when a person’s religious experience is stressful, degrading, dangerous, abusive, or damaging. doi:10.1371/ this article on Facebook Share this article on Twitter Share this article on LinkedIn Share this article on Messenger Share this article in email Copy the link to this article Print this article Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) and chronic cognitive impairment: A scoping review. McInnes K, Friesen CL, Mackenzie DE, Westwood DA, Boe SG. Discussing sexual health after traumatic brain injury: an unmet need!. Interventions for managing skeletal muscle spasticity following traumatic brain injury. Traumatic brain injury-induced sleep disorders. Assessing connectivity related injury burden in diffuse traumatic brain injury. Traumatic alterations in consciousness: traumatic brain injury. Traumatic brain injury: current treatment strategies and future endeavors. Galgano M, Toshkezi G, Qiu X, Russell T, Chin L, Zhao LR.