Trigger Warning / Content Warning: Brief description of childhood abuse and harmful theological ideologies. This post reflects personal insights and research. Individual experiences of religious trauma and spiritual abuse will differ.
Trauma is in the eye of the beholder - Theresa Pasquale.
For many, experiences within religious communities can leave lasting scars. Religious trauma, like other forms of trauma, can manifest in unexpected ways, triggering intense emotional and physical sensations that stick with you long after the original harm.
Have you ever been in a conversation with someone, driving down the highway, or smell-a-smell and instantly feel detached from your reality and back into the scary, uncomfortable, or traumatizing experience? That experience of dissociation is called a trigger—an interaction that teleports you to the past—your body feels it, your mind sees it, and yet here and now, there is little to no danger or threat.
I didn’t grow up in a physically or emotionally safe home. Some of my caregivers were abusive and neglectful. While some of my story includes physical abuse, there is also the enduring pain of the emotional toil that my little self experienced.
(Content warning ahead—you can skip this section if you prefer)
I remember standing on the light-tan square-tiles near the front door of our home in Nevada. I looked at him on the couch, interrupted his TV show, and said, “love doesn’t hit.” I was tired of being told I was loved and yet, my body was continually hit, bruised, and battered from his drunken rage and sober neglect.
Love doesn’t hit. Love doesn’t hurt.
Love doesn’t hurt.
That sentence has come up more recently in my personal therapy work, reminding me that even in unsafe systems, something in me still knew the truth about love.
And I am so proud of little me, little Andrew, standing up for love.
I didn’t grow up in the church or really know what theology was. All I really knew was what my grandmother taught me about kindness and the feelings in my body about right and wrong. At that age, my spirituality was full of desperate, angry prayers—cries for a miracle that went unanswered. Ultimately, what brought safety wasn’t divine intervention, but human compassion and agency. I spoke up. A caring parent listened. The legal system responded. My body finally found physical safety. Those early experiences taught me what it means to claim agency for my wellbeing.
I wish that were the end of my story with trauma. But new layers formed later in the church.
When I was in high school, a girl from my Spanish class, invited me to youth group. I went because I thought she was cute. What I found was a community that spoke about a loving God. And they also spoke about hell, wrath, and the end of the world—a lot. I felt the dissonance in my core. My body tensed while my mind tried to reason it away. When I asked questions, I was told my doubts were a form of rebellion.
Years later, I learned about Jonathan Edwards’ famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. In it, humanity is compared to spiders dangling over the fires of hell. The image is unforgettable: God as disgusted with people, dangling us with rage, ready to drop us in. The metaphor is clear: God hates us.
I understand being terrified of spiders. My son once screamed in panic over one in our hallway. I… relocated it, scooped my boy into my arms, and felt his little body trembling against mine. His screams were in terror. He only calmed when I breathed slowly with him and shared my calmer nervous system with his.
The terror I could see in him is the same terror that is recorded in the first-hand accounts of Edward’s sermon. People literally writhing on the floor. If that is how god sees humanity, my littlest self speaks up against god and Edwards to say, “love doesn’t hurt.”
Our nervous systems can’t tell the difference between a physical threat and a spiritual or emotional one. And a theology of fear doesn’t just shape belief, it gets known in the nervous system. Years of participation in high-control or shame-based religious systems can activate the same survival patterns as other forms of physical trauma. Our bodies stay alert, even when our souls long for rest.
The Body’s Defenses
Most people are familiar with fight or flight responses in our bodies. Recent trauma researchers also name our body’s freeze and fawn responses. These four defenses are the body’s way of surviving all forms of danger: spiritual, emotional, or physical. Learning about them, learning how to recognize them in our body, helps us reclaim agency and dignity.
Fight: In religious spaces, the fight response is often triggered by preachers who use aggression to defend belief systems or silence dissent. The fight response isn’t always a brawl. This response is intended to mobile our bodies to protect ourselves and those we love. All too often this energy is hijacked and redirected to an unseen force like spiritual darkness or “the devil”. Redirecting this energy interrupts our liberation.
Flight: This is the urge to run. Yet in many religious environments, flight is punished. We’re told that abandoning the community means we are sinful and we risk losing salvation. And so we abandon ourselves instead. Sometimes, leaving is the only way to get to safety. Flight can be the nervous system’s way of leading us to healing or keeping us safe in a harmful environment.
Freeze and Fawn: When our nervous systems determine that fight or flight are futile, we try to just survive the harm by freezing or fawning. These responses are quieter but just as powerful. This response often shows up as “don’t make waves” and “don’t be divisive” and, unfortunately, is often praised as a point of religious piety and spiritual maturity.
Freeze might look like feeling numb or detached during a church service or being unable to voice questions.
Fawning can look like over-functioning, apologizing constantly, or silencing yourself to maintain peace.
When these patterns become habitual, we can get stuck in a literal, primal survival mode in the twenty-first century. Sometimes this shows up as _hypervigilance_: always on guard, scanning for danger. Others collapse into _burnout_: exhausted, detached, unable to feel. Many of us swing between the two or have a foot on both ends of the spectrum.
The Good News
Here’s what I’ve learned: love doesn’t hurt, manipulate, or control. When love becomes conditional or coercive, it’s no longer love, it is some sort of unholy baptism of fear drenched in dignity violations.
Healing begins when we relearn safety in our bodies. A regulated nervous system can finally rest and digest. It can breathe again. Healing takes time, repetition, and gentle curiosity. And it is possible.
Some Tools That Help
Mindfulness: The Headspace app helped me notice where anxiety lived in my body. Other options include Insight Timer, Calm, or Balance.
Breath Work: One of my grounding practices is to sit down and “extend my exhale”. This is the work of noticing your breath.
Gentle Movement: Walks, yoga, gardening, or fly fishing. Moving the body helps us remember we are safe, here, and alive.
Shared Humanity: Researcher Dr. Kristin Neff reminds us that shame heals in connection. This is why I write: to remind you (and me) that we’re not alone.
Next week, I’ll be exploring Michelle Panchuk’s hermeneutical injustice. A nefarious tactic some religious systems used to limit the language people have for pain, religious trauma, and spiritual abuse, making it harder to name or heal from harm.
Healing from religious trauma takes time, kindness, and truth-telling.
Here at the Riverside, we’re creating space to do that together—one story, one breath, one shared act of compassion at a time.
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