Sarah Nealy
Washington Blade
October 7, 2023
It took me almost 20 years to figure out I’d been in a pseudo religious cult. Born female, I wasn’t allowed to cut my hair or wear pants and there was that one time when I was nine years old that I’d heard our pastor scolding my father about being more careful I didn’t “turn out to be a lesbian.” Spoiler alert: He was unsuccessful.
Now as a full-time therapist in private practice in Arlington, Va., I’ve begun to notice that, since peak pandemic, religious trauma has become the mental health buzzword of the year.
Defined by the Global Center for Religious Research, religious trauma results from an event, series of events, relationships, or circumstances within or connected to religious beliefs, practices, or structures that is experienced by an individual as overwhelming or disruptive and has lasting adverse effects on a person’s physical, mental, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being. Before we had an official term for it, people often referred to the concept as “church hurt” or “temple torment” and other more colloquial expressions to indicate the same thing—the source of their pain lies in the foundation of religion and religious people.
Yet, it wasn’t until 2019 that the term was even coined and it’s still vastly unreported how it disproportionately impacts the queer community.
Churches and religious centers have long had a stronghold on community gatherings, and when everyone was sent home in March of 2020, an interesting phenomenon began to happen. People stopped going to church — some of them for the first time in their lives. Sure, most churches were able to pivot to online programming and live streams, but suddenly people who’d never questioned where they would be on a Saturday or a Sunday were being forced to take time and space to examine what they were doing, and most importantly, why.
Growing up in high-demand, high-control religious settings of any kind can have a drastic impact on a developing brain. The cognitive disruption caused by the pandemic — an unprecedented moment in time where everyone had to stop the routines they were used to —allowed for many people to begin to put words to the impact religious trauma had had on our cognitive, social, and psychological well-beings.
One of the most fulfilling, and yet most dangerous, aspects of religion is that it creates a framework for one to view the world and their place in it. In the right hands, this can be comforting and helpful and give people a sense of purpose and belonging. However, it’s also a vulnerable area that attracts humans solely seeking to satisfy their own desires through positions of power within religion. Suddenly that framework becomes an easy tool for self-serving purposes—and religious trauma is the result.
Being queer in a predominantly heteronormative culture means automatically being born outside the framework of society with only a linear map of identity based in doctrine that never seems to quite line up.
As a therapist with mostly queer clients, I find myself constantly working to help people deconstruct this framework in terms of how one thinks—example, reducing occurrences of black/white thinking which is rooted in the concept of good vs. evil, and nothing in between—and how one values themselves in the world. The impacts can be seen in other areas, like social anxiety and learning how to build community outside of a church setting, or empowering oneself to define spirituality and a relationship with a Higher Power by their own terms, or through obligatory relationships and lack of boundaries in familial relationships. The list of ways it impacts people can go on and on, including more severe symptoms like substance abuse, suicidal ideation, and complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Often times, people don’t even know to tie these back to origins in religious trauma and have instead internalized these issues as results of their own perceived inadequacy or brokenness.
The reality is that the queer community is at a disadvantage of often not being welcomed into the very places that center our trauma and also purport to be what can heal that trauma. This means advocating for ourselves, finding healthy and impartial avenues of support for religious trauma, and going to a hell of a lot of therapy.
Sarah Nealy, LPC, is a trauma-informed psychotherapist in the D.C. area who specializes in queer struggles, mixed-orientation relationships, and religious trauma in the queer community. Visit sarahnealylpc.com.
https://www.washingtonblade.com/2023/10/07/opinion-religious-trauma/
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