Therapy for Religious Trauma
Are you struggling to reconcile your religious upbringing with your current life?
Maybe you grew up in a faith tradition or religion.
Maybe it was pretty great.
Maybe it was traumatic.
But these days you find yourself having questions and doubts about the message.
The methods.
The teachings.
The things you were told about yourself.
Your place in all of this.
Your inherent goodness or badness.
Your body.
Your gender.
Your sexuality.
Your intimate relationships.
You’re questioning:
What you learned about right and wrong.
Who is “good” and “righteous”?
Who is “lost” and “sinful”?
What is the meaning of life?
There’s a good chance the spiritual and religious beliefs you grew up with had an answer for most of these questions.
And those answers fundamentally shaped who you are today. And it’s okay to pause and ask yourself,
How do I feel about that?
Is this working for me?
Is this even true?
The problem can sometimes come when you start asking questions and sharing doubts with the people who share your faith.
Your family might worry.
Your friends might fade away.
Your very community might question your place with them.
Asking hard questions about your faith can come at a cost. And so many people just don’t.
They keep showing up to church/synagogue/mosque,
the services,
the groups,
the community,
but inside they are really struggling to feel connected and engaged and at-peace with the very belief system that perhaps—at one point—felt like home.
You may notice the friction between your faith tradition and your current life, but you just ignore it.
You pretend like it isn’t happening.
You act like everything’s fine.
You feel massive guilt and shame about having these doubts.
You use the word “should” so often, you don’t even know what you truly want anymore.
You might lead a double-life.
Start keeping secrets in order to make it through the day.
Religious deconstruction.
Father reconstruction.
You might need help taking these beliefs apart and slowly putting them back together.
And if you’ve been victimized, abused, and/or traumatized during your religious experiences, you might be questioning if this pain and trauma will ever cease. You may wonder:
The surest way to develop mental health distress is to live an inauthentic life.
Is this just the way it will always be?
“Faith isn’t certainty. I know that by now. If I were certain,
I wouldn’t need faith.
I want to be part of a people who see the darkness, know it’s real, and then light a candle anyway.”
-Sarah Bessey,
from her book Out of Sorts
It is uniquely challenging to be asking questions about the tradition that raised you up. Because for many people—it’s not just a tradition.
It’s people.
It’s relationships.
It can feel like a divorce.
Betrayal.
Or even death.
Even if you stay in your faith community, engaging with doubt is at least a death of the certainty you used to feel.
So many people just “don’t go there” because the cost seems too high.
The risk feels too great.
But that’s no way to live.
Because these questions matter.
And your ability to feel engaged, connected, and at-peace in your faith community matters.
Therapy for Religious Trauma can help
Wrestling with life’s most fundamental questions is no small undertaking. My clinical training and personal experience in this area can help.
We would start by understanding where you’ve been,
what you’ve believed,
and the values you were taught in your faith practice.
Then, we’d consider how that aligns (or doesn’t) with where you are now,
what you believe now,
and what your values are now.
A misalignment doesn’t have to mean that you leave your community or abandon your faith. But it does mean that you weigh carefully the costs and benefits of what continued engagement might look like and how you want to move forward.
I am always going to take a trauma-informed, compassionate approach. Trauma therapy can help.
EMDR therapy can help. It’s not my place to judge where you’ve been or where our therapy sessions take you. My goal is for you to feel peace about your relationship with faith and spirituality, wherever that takes you.
I am here for your
peace.
I am here for your
healing.
I help clients:
explore answers to these fundamental life questions
learn how to navigate your ongoing doubt with your deeply held beliefs
feel capable and confident
feel more grounded and in touch with their mind, body, and spirit
be more present in their lives
heal from the trauma inflicted by people in your religion
learn to have compassion for themselves
re-engage meaningfully in healthy relationships
regain a sense of presence and confidence
get back out there and enjoy their lives!
Therapy for religious trauma isn’t the only service I offer at my Colorado online therapy practice. Other mental health services at
Heather Rose Counseling include:
Offering online therapy throughout Colorado:
Denver, Boulder, Greeley, Fort Collins, Longmont, Colorado Springs, and the Grand Junction
Contact me to learn more about how I can help you find peace with your faith and reclaim your life.
Questions before getting started?
Contact me here.
You don’t have to live with chronic depression, unmanageable anxiety, imposter syndrome, low self-esteem, or feelings of purposelessness.
Therapy for religious trauma can help you feel at home in your body, perhaps for the first time. My online therapy practice specializes in helping women who are tired of playing small in their own lives,
to find healing and empowerment.
To start your religious trauma
therapy journey, follow these three simple steps:
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a 15-minute call so I can answer your questions and you can see that I won't bite
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meet with Heather for an intake session to talk about your goals