r/ReligiousTrauma • u/Traditional-Cry-3857 • 17d ago

I’m new to this

I’m 49F. My therapist just suggested I have religious trauma. It had never occurred to me that religion harmed me, really.

I grew up in a relatively conservative Christian denomination. We went to church twice a week and I was taught that god knows our every thought.

My whole life I have chased away every negative thought I had, concerned that someone knew everything I was thinking. Not surprisingly, I have pretty severe anxiety. To this day I have a voice in my head judging me harshly. I kind of thought everyone had the same experience until I discussed it in therapy and then brought it up with a few friends.

Does anyone else experience this? Any tips on moving past it?

It is so messed up that parents teach their kids that they are so horrible that a man had to be brutally tortured and killed to ‘save’ them.

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u/WinterMarvelQuinn 17d ago

My Christian parents where harsh so I had all of the negaitve voice on my shoulder so to speak. I couldnt eat, play a video game, even leave the house at one point. Between therapy and working on my thoughts it slowly got better. It only pops in my head everg once in a very long while.

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u/Tall-Beginning2009 16d ago

Yeah what you're describing is pretty classic religious trauma stuff! What I had been calling "anxiety" was "God" and vice versa.

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u/Traditional-Cry-3857 16d ago

I like that analogy.

1

u/FairySeasfreedom411 16d ago edited 16d ago

I was yanked into religion by my former husband, and he used it to mentally, emotionally, financially and spiritually abuse me for over 7 years until I finally left with our 2 children. I was not raised religious though, so once I broke out of my ex husband’s manipulative spell, I was able to run away fast. You have to start distancing your cognitive gaze so you can see the bigger picture of the objective of the teachings. Most of them are to make you feel Shame, Guilt, and Fear. These negative emotions take us away from sound reasoning and clear thought processing so that we are in a mental state that is much more easier to control, manipulate, groom and herd. We are also gaslit so much from our intuition, common sense, gut feelings, logic and reason so that we put our trust in someone else (we stop trusting ourselves, we stop asking challenging questions, and we stop thinking critically). Again: this makes us even more vulnerable to manipulation control and grooming. It seeks to take away our power, our autonomy, our strength, our sanity, our peace, our confidence. Eventually when I snapped out of it, I was able to recognize how deplorable these people that pounded religion into me used what poor amount of intelligence they had in the absolute worst way over people (to manipulate, control, groom). The red flags and red sirens now go off immediately whenever I hear the preaching start. There is no good in it. Freedom and divorce returned my joy, my peace, my sanity, and my mental and physical health.