Religious Trauma is Complex Trauma

Episode 114

Religious trauma isn't always loud. Sometimes it sounds like obedience, like humility, like letting go. You were conditioned over and over to believe that when something didn't fit, the problem was you. Your wants, your desires, your dreams.

If you grew up in a high control religion, this probably hits close to home. And here's what needs to be said clearly: religious trauma is complex trauma. It's not about having weak faith or being too sensitive. It's about how certain religious systems create lasting harm through repeated experiences that overwhelm your system, shape your core beliefs, and disconnect you from your own internal knowing.

In my recent conversation with Cassidy DuHadway, trauma therapist and author of "Becoming Me: Unraveling and Healing the Sacred Wounds of Religious Trauma," we talked about what religious trauma actually is, how it shows up in your life years later, and what real healing looks like.

What Religious Trauma Actually Is

Religious trauma is trauma that happens within a religious framework. It uses the language of spirituality, God, rules, and righteousness to shape how you see yourself and your worth. It tells you that love and belonging are conditional on being good enough, righteous enough, obedient enough.

When you grow up in a religion from the very beginning, there's no way to separate it from attachment. Your earliest beliefs about emotions, worth, and safety get formed between ages three and five. If not all emotions are allowed during that developmental window, if you don't receive the emotional support you need, you develop belief systems rooted in that emotional neglect.

This is why religious trauma is complex trauma. It's not one big traumatic event. It's the small things over time. The repeated messages. The constant monitoring of your thoughts and behaviors. The fear of eternal consequences. The pressure to perform perfection while calling it humility.

Signs You Might Be Dealing With Religious Trauma

If you grew up in any religion that demanded you not be yourself in any way, that's worth exploring. Here's what to watch for:

Thought patterns around worthiness Do you constantly feel like you need to repent, prove yourself, or check with others about whether you're doing things right? Do you struggle with the belief that you have to earn love, worth, or belonging through being righteous or good enough?

Shame responses Pay attention to what happens in your body when someone challenges what you've always known as normal. Do you feel intense shame or pushback? Does questioning feel dangerous?

Difficulty trusting yourself Many high control religions teach you to outsource your internal knowing. You were taught to always pray about decisions, ask church leadership, or follow specific rules about right and wrong. This removes your ability to trust your own sense of what's good or bad, which is actually what keeps you safe in relationships and life.

Hyperresponsibility for others' emotions Especially for women in these systems, you learned that you're responsible for everyone else's feelings. You can't disappoint anyone. You need to change your behavior to avoid making others uncomfortable. This isn't boundaries failing you. This is trauma wiring.

The Shelf Breaking Moment

Most people dealing with religious trauma go through what Cassidy calls "putting things on a shelf." You get information that doesn't quite fit your faith worldview and you think, "I don't like that one, I'm going to put that on a shelf and not question it too much."

Then another thing happens that doesn't fit. On the shelf it goes.

And another. And another.

At some point, the shelf breaks because there are too many things on it that don't make sense. That's when people crash. Your whole identity gets challenged. You don't know who you are anymore. And if you grew up in a high demand religion that says you're out if you're not in, you potentially lose your family, your community, your business, your entire life as you knew it.

Some people go through full deconstruction of their religious views. Some do it quickly, some slowly. Some people put everything back on the shelf because they choose to belong in that community, and in order to do that, they have to put those conflicting pieces back where they were.

There's no right way to do this. But understanding that the crash is normal, that the grief is real, and that the identity loss makes sense can help you not feel like you're the problem.

The Attachment Rupture No One Talks About

Something that doesn't get discussed enough is that sometimes your religion or your deity actually becomes your attachment figure. This is especially true if you grew up in the system from childhood.

When that shifts, when your faith changes or breaks, you don't just have an attachment rupture with your family or community. You can have an attachment rupture with your God. With the one relationship you thought would never fail you. The one that promised unconditional love if you just followed the rules.

That's devastating. And it's a specific kind of grief that people outside of religious trauma often don't understand.

Why Family Dynamics Get So Hard

One of the most painful parts of religious trauma recovery is navigating family when you're deconstructing and they're staying in the system.

You want to be seen and heard in your new space. You want them to understand what you're going through, to make room for your shifting beliefs, to still love you even though you're questioning everything.

But the family that stays in the system often has very little to no desire to see you in that new space. Why? Because it conflicts with their internal sense of self. They've been taught that the religion is who they are. There's no ability to separate it.

So families continue their religious rituals and expect you to conform. They don't restructure family gatherings to allow all belief systems to belong. They don't ask, "How can we do Thanksgiving in a way that works for everyone?" Instead, they pray before meals and expect you to participate or leave the room. They make comments about your clothes, your choices, your kids.

This requires a level of emotional intelligence that many of these family systems simply don't have. And for women especially, it requires trauma work to build the skill of saying, "Her crying in the corner because I'm not participating in the prayer? That's on her. I'm going to remain in my integrity and do what I need to do for myself."

That's hard. It takes real work to get there.

The Layers of Grief in Religious Trauma

There are multiple waves of grief in this process, and they don't come all at once.

First, there's grief when you realize what your story means and how it impacted you. When you start to see that what you experienced was actually harmful, not loving. That you were emotionally neglected, not just asked to be faithful.

Then there's a different layer of grief when you realize where your life is now versus where it could have been if you'd had different choices earlier.

Cassidy works with many women in their 40s and 50s who got married at 18, had their babies, and are now empty nesters looking at their partners thinking, "I don't know if I would have married this person if I'd known more about myself and had real choices."

That's heavy. You get to grieve that. And you also get to know that you can still choose your current life, just from a place of actual choice rather than obligation or fear of eternal consequences.

The tricky part? Most people dealing with religious trauma were never taught how to grieve. Emotional neglect is common in high control religions. Our culture has very few rituals around grieving, and the ones we have are fast and expected to be over quickly.

Learning what grieving actually is, how to do it, and that it's allowed becomes an essential part of healing.

The Cost of Purity Culture

We can't talk about religious trauma without addressing purity culture. The harm here runs deep and shows up in so many ways.

Purity culture changes your sense of self. How you think about your body. How you interact in relationships. How you experience sexuality.

You're taught from a young age that you're not allowed to have sex, think sexual thoughts, masturbate, or explore your own body. These things are shameful. Evil. They make you less worthy.

Then suddenly when you're married, you're expected to just switch that off and enjoy sex. Be available. Be enthusiastic. Just flip the script overnight.

It doesn't work that way. This causes real rupture in people's bodies. Sometimes pain. Always fear and shame that takes significant time and therapeutic work to process.

And it's not just about sex. Purity culture teaches you that your body is something to be controlled, managed, and covered up. That pleasure is suspicious. That your desires are problematic. This disconnection from your body makes trauma recovery even harder because you can't come back into your body to find your internal knowing when you've been taught your body is the problem.

How Trauma Therapy Helps

Healing from religious trauma requires actual trauma work. Not just deciding to set boundaries or think differently. Not just reading books or listening to podcasts, though those help. You need therapeutic support that addresses the deep nervous system wiring and core beliefs formed in childhood.

EMDR therapy is particularly effective for religious trauma because it helps you reprocess the experiences that created shame-based beliefs. It allows you to shift from trauma response to true choice.

Here's what that means practically: You might do the same behaviors after healing, like expressing yourself boldly or making different choices than your family. But the why behind it changes. Instead of acting from a place of "I'm doing this because of what happened to me," you move to "I'm doing this because it's truly who I am."

The same behavior becomes more authentic when it comes from choice rather than reaction.

Somatic work matters too because you need to rebuild trust in your body. You need to learn that your internal sensations, your gut feelings, your instincts are actually information you can use. This takes time when you've spent your whole life being taught to ignore those signals in favor of external authority.

Reclaiming Your Internal Knowing

One of the most important parts of healing is reaccessing your internal knowing. That sense of what's right for you. What feels safe. What you actually want versus what you think you should want.

When you've been taught to outsource all of that to prayer, to church leadership, to scripture, to your spouse, coming back to yourself feels scary. And sometimes you realize you never had that internal knowing because the religious trauma started so early. So it's not about reclaiming something you lost. It's about building a completely new foundation.

This includes learning to regulate your nervous system in uncertainty. When you grow up in a system that promises you can know the answers to everything if you just follow the formula, uncertainty feels intolerable. Knowing something regulates your nervous system. Not knowing activates it.

Learning to sit with "I don't know" and "I'm figuring this out" without falling apart becomes essential work.

What Healing Can Look Like

Healing from religious trauma doesn't mean you have to leave your faith entirely, though some people do. It means you get to actually choose what you believe and why, instead of operating from fear or obligation.

It means learning how to be you. Discovering what you actually like, what you want, what matters to you when you strip away all the shoulds.

It means recognizing that you can make choices about your life, your relationships, your path forward. Those choices might look like staying in modified relationship with your religious community. They might look like complete separation. They might look like finding a different spiritual practice that actually nourishes you.

The point isn't what you choose. The point is that you get to choose. And that choice comes from your true self, not from trauma response or fear of consequences.

As Cassidy says, learning how to be you is powerful. It gives you the opportunity to make choices and to be the person you want to be, regardless of the story and the religion and the faith systems you were given.

If You're In This

If you're reading this and recognizing yourself, here's what I want you to know:

What you experienced was real. The harm was real. Your feelings about it are valid. You're not too sensitive, not lacking faith, not the problem.

Religious trauma is complex trauma, and it requires real therapeutic support to heal. Find a therapist who understands religious trauma specifically, who won't minimize your experience or try to reconcile you back to a system that harmed you.

Give yourself permission to grieve. To be angry. To question everything. To move slowly. To change your mind multiple times about what you believe and who you want to be.

And remember that on the other side of this work, you get to be fully yourself. Not the version of you that fits into someone else's system. The actual you, with all your complexity and desires and dreams intact.

That's worth fighting for.

Get More Support

Free Dysregulation SOS Toolkit: Nervous system regulation techniques you can use in real time, including covert techniques for the dinner table. Download here

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About Cassidy DuHadway: Cassidy DuHadway, LCSW, is a trauma therapist, EMDR Approved Trainer, and author of "Becoming Me: Unraveling and Healing the Sacred Wounds of Religious Trauma." She specializes in complex trauma and emotional neglect and is the CEO of Purple Sky Counseling in Utah.

Connect with Cassidy:

• Follow Cassidy on Instagram: @therapywithcassidy

• Check out her website: cassidyduhadway.com

• Purchase her book: "Becoming Me: Unraveling and Healing The Sacred Wounds of Religious Trauma

• Learn more about her Utah therapy practice and work with her team: Purple Sky Counseling

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