Religious Trauma ❌ Childhood Trauma
How this intersection exacerbates the pain
I have been thinking about how religious trauma often seems to be more severe when it occurs in a setting where childhood trauma also happened. My hypothesis1 is that positive parental relationships will help mediate the effects of religious trauma. Conversely, religious trauma that occurs in the hands of a caregiver who is also some form of neglectful or abusive will exacerbate the severity of the religious trauma specifically. Sound a bit too intellectual? I’ll illustrate with examples.
FWIW, I hope you know I love hearing from you all about your personal experiences, so if any of this resonates with you OR is opposite your experience, I want to know! If you’re a lurker who hasn’t commented yet, I promise I’m friendly, and I genuinely enjoy hearing from you. :)
Someone who grows up in a family where they securely know they are loved by their parent(s) is given a huge leg up in navigating future traumas. This person feels a sense of belonging in the world and are able to have some level of confidence in themselves and their sense of purpose. They know they have a “secure base” to reach back to in times of trouble, who they know they can rely on to love and support them.
This same person, when met with the religious indoctrination most of us experienced, will probably be more likely to sift out the bad stuff that doesn’t align with their internal schemas of the world. They have intuited (via relationship with caregivers) that the world is overall a safe place and built on some kind of foundation of love. I imagine they would be more likely to focus on the loving aspects of God and Jesus. Perhaps the cognitive dissonance of a “loving God” who did very unloving things would not bother them, or perhaps they would realize it and be more easily able to stop believing without causing chaos in the rest of their life. If you don’t have to find (*theoretically* unconditional) love through the Christian god because you’ve already experienced that somewhere else, the need to stay in a harmful religion is greatly reduced.
A person who has experienced abuse or neglect growing up would be more impacted by religious trauma, I hypothesize, if they relied heavily on unhealthy religion as a resource for feeling okay. Even if you weren’t abused or neglected, but didn’t receive the nurturing and attachment bonds your little self needed, you still show up to the scene with some attachment wounds. If you then go looking for that nurturing relationship in a god or religion — but that god is not really the unconditional source of love that you wanted — you will end up further wounded.
Additionally, if you know that in order to stay in your parent’s good graces, you have to keep on believing what they believe (a story many of us share!), this is inherently conditional love. (perhaps I can’t even call it love; honestly, it’s just approval). We know deep in our bones that to stop believing is to lose that approval, which was our paltry fill-in for love. Grappling with loss of a parent’s love is a heavy existential question loaded with grief.
I was an angsty teenager in the religion department — interestingly, not in most of the other departments. But I grew up in with German / Polish heritage, from people who did not speak about emotions, where hard work and not complaining were valued. I learned from church and youth group that God wanted to connect with me emotionally, but also was sad when I didn’t live according to his standards.
My pre-existing schema was that hard work and good (read: docile, submissive) behavior was praised, but I had very little schema for how to connect with people emotionally. (This may have been compounded by neurodivergence; the jury is still slightly out on this nature vs nurture question!). So now I was being asked to connect emotionally with God — a skill I didn’t really have — and what I did know was how to “behave well,” but this was both not enough (purity culture! obedience! submission!) and something I shouldn’t be proud of (“everyone is a sinner!”). So I learned to hate the ways I fell short, but struggled to have that all-important emotional connection with God, the ever-existing presence of Jesus in my heart that I could “feel” at all times. I was never doing or feeling enough, and that weird nexus of emotion-driven yet intellectualizing evangelicalism was my perfect storm of learning to despise the teachings I came from.
That is a just a little snapshot of how my particular proclivities influenced the way I experienced religious trauma. I strongly believe that the way we experience life — attachment relationships, presence of abuse or neglect, values instilled, whether our parents are willing to grow or stay stagnant — also influences the way we experiences religious trauma.
Whew! Kind of a weighty topic today for those who have gone through it. If you feel comfortable, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section! What has your experience been living in or observing this intersection of childhood / religious trauma? How was/is your recovery impacted by the intersection?
Unfortunately I never pursued a PhD or PsyD so I don’t actually have the resources to study this. Do I hope some researcher will stumble upon my blog and say “wow Christine, you have really great ideas! Can we pay you to join our research team?” Yes. Yes I do.
This is so, so well written. What you express here about how you experienced certain aspects of your upbringing maps onto mine in many ways, but you've described it with so much more clarity (and succinctness) than I have ever seemed capable of in terms of what you learned, what your thoughts and feelings ended up being and why.
I have talked to quite a few people who grew up going to Christian churches over the years about my religious trauma and asked them if they can relate. Mostly, they can't. Time and again, I have heard them describe how the Bible landed with them as a love story. Really?! Genocide, slavery, gang rape, animal sacrifice, child abuse, mysogyny, extremism, retribution, vengeance ... That's what love looks like to them?!? How does that work?
For so long, I just couldn't figure out how their brain could have come away from having been pumped full of Bible stories in such a different state than mine did. What I see in the Bible is cruelty, gaslighting, manipulation, vengeance, and so, so, so much violence both physical and emotional. How can other people look at this same book and see love?
And then I began to wonder if there might be some mediating factor, such as how their parents treated them. As in, if they attended Sunday school and learn about, oh, I don't know, eternal *&^%$ torture after death in hell for them and everyone they love unless they can make themselves admire the type of deity that would behave that way in the first place, they just write it off, somehow, because it does not match with the mostly loving treatment they've received from their parents. Their brain just kind of discards the whole idea of hell or punishment or vengeance somehow due to things like that being outside their experience? Their brain auto-discards whichever portions of the theology don't work for them and their health/sanity/sense of wellbeing???
Its almost as though instead of taking it to heart what they are taught, instead of them taking it literally, due to something their brain does for them (i.e. goes with the empirical evidence from their actual life over the speculations of an ancient book), they walk away from even the most hateful, terrifying, violent and enraging teachings with their sanity in tact. Their parents have been more or less supportive of them and they have all these file folders of experiences with that. That's what love looks like to them, how their parents have *actually* behaved, and so, when they look at the Bible, they are able to see the Bible through that lens? (Or, more accurately, unable to see the Bible through any lens but that lens, the one forged for them in the experiences of love and support, over all, from their parents.) And so when the Bible says, "God is love," they conclude (!?!?) there must be some way it's all going to work out? That some how, some way, God will, in the end, be patient, gentle, and kind, as their parents have been?
This seems unfathomable to me.
All the horrible behavior of the Christian deity I had beaten into me at church ***was a match*** to how my parents behaved. Cruelty was the reality of my lived experience at home, so it made sense to me to take the Bible at face value. It describes an emotionally immature deity that behaves erratically, unreasonably, and most of all, cruelly.
So this is the only way I can explain this phenomenon. That how parents treat their kids will strongly mediate how religious doctrines land with the kids.
This is even true of a close friend of mine, S., who grew up in a house with an alcoholic father who beat him so severely and so often that S. had to wear long sleeves and long pants to school year round to cover up the bruises. The father screamed at S. often, too, in anger. But what the father *never* did was ****shame**** S. My friend S. seems to describe having been on the receiving end of what we might call "clean" anger, just anger pure and simple--anger with no mix-in of disgust (i.e. contempt, the anger we see from parents such as mine, the parents who rule by "shame on you!!!" and "how dare you!!!"). S. tells me that he hated his father growing up. And even once struck his father so hard, S. broke some fingers. But never once, says S., can he recall feeling bad ****about himself***** with all this violent treatment. (Unfathomable to me. I cannot imagine what my life would have been and who I would be without shame. It was the warp and woof of my entire existence growing up.) And when I ask S. (who, on his own, as a teenager, read the Bible from cover to cover and attended church weekly the whole time he was growing up, although, admittedly at a very love-y sounding Catholic church) about what he thinks of the Bible, he says, "The main message I got was love."
I think you've posited a very important research question, Christine. Thank you for this enriching and thought-provoking post. I hope you'll use the psy credentials you *do* have (which are fancier than those of 99% of those of the population of the U.S., I'd bet) to look into this further. :)
Lots of interesting ideas here! It is also interesting how siblings (even close in age) can have vastly different experiences growing up in the same family, same church, same church camp, and so on. It is interesting to compare stories with my sibling now and notice the different things we absorbed from the same people/events. So, maybe that gives some anecdotal support for the neurodivergent aspects of your hypothesis.
My sibling and I had a good talk earlier this year about how we weren't abused, and we were provided for growing up, but that something was lacking. I really think now that I have done so much healing and re-parenting for myself that my parents did the best they could, but just weren't emotionally aware or emotionally mature. So, we just all muddled our way through. One of my parents has grown a lot in the last couple decades. I don't think it is a coincidence that this parent is the one who has practically left the church.
The paragraph you wrote about trying to be good and to feel the Jesus in your heart really resonated with me. I also picked up on (as a youngster) the wrath and cruelty and inconsistencies in the bible. That just fed the fears that I wasn't "doing it right". The adults in my life were really not dialed in at all to what was going on with me. Fortunately I did feel pretty secure in knowing I was constantly loved, particularly from one grandmother.
Thanks so much for your writing. I also finally don't feel so alone in this journey.