Do I Have Religious Trauma? 5 Signs A Counselor Looks For

Elisha's Space: Your hands got cold. Maybe your chest got tight. Maybe you walked into a church building. Not even your church. Maybe someone else's wedding or a funeral. And your body started looking for the exits before you even sat down. and you sat there thinking, what is wrong with me? I love God. I love, I believe in Jesus. So why does being in this place, in this space, feel like danger? I want to talk to you today because what you just described, that response in your body has a name and knowing the name of it, might be the most healing thing that happens to you. Welcome to Elisha Space, a sanctuary for healing growth and for the kind of honest conversations that actually change things. I'm Elisha, your host, a counselor, an author, and someone who has sat in the very same stuck places you have. If you're new here, welcome home. And if you've been listening for a while, I see you and I'm glad you're back. Today's episode is practical, clinical, but pastoral. And it is one I have wanted to make for a very long time because I sit with people in my counseling practice every single week who are carrying something they don't have a word for. They know they were hurt. They know something happened, but the church told them it wasn't real, or it was their fault, or that naming it would be divisive, so they've been silent. Today, we are going to give it a name. We are talking about religious trauma and what it actually is, what it looks like in your body and your relationships. and your prayer life. And I'm going to give you five specific signs I look for as a counselor. five signs that what you experience may qualify as religious trauma. Stay with me. Let me give you the clinical container first, because I know some of you need the clinical truth before the person can land. Religious trauma, sometimes called religious trauma syndrome, is a recognized psychological framework describing a cluster of symptoms that develop when a person's religious experience causes significant and lasting psychological harm. When the system designed to bring you closer to God became the primary source of fear, shame, and the dismantling of your own sense of self. The term was developed by Dr. Marlene Whannell, a psychologist and former fundamentalist herself, who observed that people leaving high control religious environments were showing patterns that look very much like PTSD. The symptoms were real. The nervous system damage was real, but there was no vocabulary for it. Now, and I want to be very careful here. Religious trauma does not mean God harmed you. ⁓ It means the institution, the leaders, the system, or the theology as it was delivered to you caused harm. Those are not the same thing and this episode will hold that distinction carefully all the way through. Knowledge isn't just power for trauma survivors. Knowledge is safety. So let's look at the five signs and as I go through them, I want you to pay attention to what happens in your body because your body knows things your mind was told not to say. Sign number one, your body reacts to religious cues before your mind has a chance to decide how to feel. I'm talking about hearing a specific worship song and feeling your jaw clench. I'm talking about someone beginning to pray over you and your stomach dropping. I'm talking about a phrase like, God told me, or this is for your own good. or you need to submit and your chest constructs before a single conscious thought forms. This is called somatic memory. Your nervous system has learned through repeated experience that certain sounds, smells, spaces, and phrases are associated with threat and it responds accordingly. Heart rate up, muscles tight, eye scanning. This is not a spiritual problem. This is your nervous system doing exactly what a nervous system does. Is there tension anywhere in your body right now as you're listening to me? Maybe in your throat, your chest, your shoulders. Take a breath. Let your nervous system know you are safe here. One of the most important things I can tell you as a counselor, your body is not lying to you. Your body has been keeping a record of everything your mind was told to minimize. And when it sounds an alarm, even in a space that looks safe to everyone around you, it is telling the truth based on what it has already survived. If you walk into a church and feel like you need to run, that is not spiritual weakness. That might be wisdom. And we are going to learn to honor that. There are four more signs and they get more personal from here. So stay with me. Sign number two, shame has become your resting state. I need to make a clinical distinction here because it matters enormously. Guilt says I did something wrong. Guilt has an object. It can be resolved through repentance, repair, and forgiveness. Guilt is actually healthy when it's proportional and accurate. Shame says something different. Shame says, I am wrong. I am too much. I am not enough. I am fundamentally defective and it is only a matter of time before everyone figures that out. Shame doesn't have an object. Shame is the state of being. And for many survivors of religious trauma, shame was the primary compliance mechanism. Every time you asked a question, shame, Every time you had a need, shame. Every time your body had a normal human response to an impossible standard, shame. Every time you do a boundary, shame dressed up as pride or rebellion. You were not born with this shame, it was installed. And one of the most painful features of religious trauma is that shame feels true. It feels confirmed by scripture, by sermons, the voice of leaders who represented God to you. It doesn't feel like something that was done to you. It feels like a revelation of who you actually are. But here is what Romans chapter eight, verse one says, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, not reduced condemnation, not condemnation managed through enough performance and compliance. no condemnation. That is not the message you received and the gap between what you received and what is actually true. That gap is where the religious trauma lives. Sign number three. And this is the most spiritually painful one. God feels like a threat. You can't pray without gracing for impact. You open scripture and hear accusation more than invitation. When something goes wrong in your life, your first instinct is not, God is with me in this. It's, what did I do to deserve this? You expect punishment more than grace. You've learned to manage God the same way you learned to manage the people who represented him. Clinically, there is a concept from object relations theory, a psychological framework studying how we build internal representations of relationships that says we map our early experiences with significant authority figures directly onto our image of God. In other words, if the people who represented God to you were controlling, unpredictable, shaming, or conditional in their love, then the God you carry internally is controlling, unpredictable, shaming, and conditional. Not because that is who God is, but because that is who God looked like through the only lens you had access to. This isn't a crisis of faith. This is a crisis of representation. And healing doesn't look like forcing yourself to feel what you don't feel. It doesn't look like white-knuckling your way through prayer until you manufacture warmth. Healing looks like slowly, carefully rebuilding an accurate picture with support, with safety, with people who can hold the clinical and the spiritual at the same time. His peace is not dependent on your circumstances being resolved. It is a regulated nervous system and the presence of a safe God. If you have ever experienced God is safe, I am not asking you to pretend. I am inviting you to consider that God who was shown to you may not be the God who is actually there. Signs four and five are the ones most people don't recognize in themselves. Stay with me. Sign number four, you lose yourself around spiritual authority. I see this in my counseling practice more than almost anything else. Someone who is articulate and clear and confident in every other area of their life. And then they walk into a room with a pastor, an elder, a ministry leader, and something shifts. They get smaller. They defer before they're even sent. have said anything. They leave the meeting thinking, why didn't I say what I was actually thinking? Why did I agree when I didn't agree? What is happening is called the fawn response. It is the fourth survival strategy after fight, flight and freeze. Fawning is the strategy of appeasing the perceived threat, agreeing before the correction comes. making yourself small enough to say stave. And in a high-controlled religious environment, fawning was adaptive. It kept you from being labeled rebellious or unteachable or unsubmissive. It kept you from the public correction, the elder meetings, the prayer circles designed to bring you back into compliance. Fawning kept you safe, but fawning has a cost. The cost is you. This sign does not mean you are weak. It does not mean you need more accountability or more discipline. It means your nervous system learned that being yourself was a liability and it found a way to protect you. God gave you discernment. He gave you a voice. He gave you a gut that is capable of sensing when something is wrong. That instinct is not rebellion. That is wisdom and learning to trust it again slowly with support without shame. That is part of the healing. Sign number five. This is the one I want you to sit with longest. You grieve a God you're not sure you can trust anymore. Not because you don't want to trust and not because you want to walk away from your faith, but because your faith was so tightly woven into a system, a community, a set of leaders, an entire identity. And when that system broke, When the community failed you, when what you were promised was safety and you got harmed instead, God seemed to have gotten tangled up in all of it. And now you don't know how to separate what was God from what was that institution. What was Jesus from what was that pastor? What was genuine spiritual encounter? from what was emotional manipulation dressed in spiritual language. And that grief is real. It is one of the most complex forms of grief I've ever witnessed clinically because you are grieving at the same time a relationship, a community, an identity, a worldview, and sometimes the future you had planned inside that faith all at once. What I want you to hear and I want you to let this land before you move on. The God that you are grieving is not the same God who is grieving with you right now. The God who is actually there, the one in scripture who weeps at a grave site, who runs down the road towards a returning child who says, I have loved you with an everlasting love. I have drawn you with an unfailing kindness that God has not left you, that God did not offer the harm done in His name, and that God has been waiting for you very patiently in the deconstruction, not to condemn you for your questions, to meet you end them. So five signs, your body reacting before your mind does. Shame as a resting state, God feeling like a threat, losing yourself around spiritual authority, grieving at God you're not sure you can trust. If you hurt yourself in one of those or in several of them, here is what I need you to know. You are not too broken to heal. You are not too far from God to find your way back. And naming what happened to you is not betrayal. Naming it is the beginning of truth. Religious trauma is real. Religious trauma syndrome is a documented research, clinically recognized set of symptoms. And you naming it, saying it out loud, I think something happened to me in the name of religion. And I think it hurt me. That is not faithlessness. That is courage. I am a counselor. I am also a woman of faith. And I sit with people every single week who are holding both of those things at the same time. Deep love for God and real harm done by God's people. You can hold both. You don't have to choose. If you would like to support in working through this, I would be honored to sit with you. The link to book a session with me is in the description below. Let me pray with you. Father, I am grateful that you are a God who sees, the God who does not flinch from the hard questions, the God who is not threatened by our anger or our grief or our confusion about who you are. I am praying right now for every person listening who's been hurt in a space that was supposed to be safe. For every person who walked into a church that came out smaller than when they went in. For every person who was told that their questions were rebellion and their needs were weakness and their body's wisdom was faithlessness. restore what was taken, rebuild what was dismantled, let the truth about who you actually are reach places in us that the institution never could. You are safe. You are good. And you are not the God who was weaponized against us. Let us know the difference. Let us feel the difference in the quiet, in the rebuilding, in the slow and holy work of healing. In Jesus' amen. Here is your invitation. I want you to start a journal and at the top of the first page write what I was told about God and on the page next to it what I actually want to know is true about God. This week don't force the second column just fill in the first one honestly. because you cannot build a new relationship on top of a distorted one without first naming the distortion. Truth telling is where healing starts and you don't have to do it alone. If this episode helped you, share it. Text it to one person you know who has been hurt by the church. or who has been silent about their faith pain because I didn't have a word for it. You might be giving someone their first word today. Find more episodes, resources and information about working with me at www.RestoringYou, Y-O-U, ChristianCounseling.com. And if you find us today for the first time, welcome home. Until next time, you are not too much and you are not too far and you are not alone.