What Is Religious Trauma — and Can Therapy Actually Help?
Religious trauma is real. And in Utah, one of the most religiously saturated states in the country, it is also remarkably common and remarkably under-addressed.
People experiencing religious trauma often don't know that's what it is. They know they're struggling. They know something broke. They know that leaving — or staying — cost them more than they expected. But naming it, understanding it, and finding real support for it can feel impossible, especially in a culture where faith is so deeply woven into community, family, and identity.
This post is for the people who are quietly carrying this. It's for the person who left a faith community and still grieves it. For the person who experienced something in a church that no one believed, or minimized, or said they should forgive and forget. For the person who is deconstructing beliefs they've held since childhood and doesn't know who they are on the other side.
You are not alone. And therapy can genuinely help.
What Religious Trauma Actually Is
Religious trauma occurs when a person's experience of religion, of a faith community, a religious leader, a belief system, or a spiritual authority — causes lasting psychological harm.
It is important to say clearly: faith itself is not the source of the harm. God is not the source of the harm. What causes religious trauma is what happens when human beings use spiritual authority as a tool of control, manipulation, shame, or abuse — and when the systems around them allow it, cover it up, or tell the wounded person they are the problem.
As Steve Pierson — pastor, author, and founder of Redemption Hill Church in Utah — writes in his book Spiritually Abused: it was not God who hurt you. It was a person who twisted, corrupted, and abused the name of God — using a corrupted sense of authority to wound and control. That distinction is not a small one. It is often the beginning of healing.
Religious trauma can look very different from person to person. It might look like:
Spiritual abuse — being controlled, manipulated, shamed, silenced, or harmed by a religious leader or authority figure who used their spiritual position to justify what they did
Faith transition grief — leaving a religion and losing not just a belief system but an entire world: your community, your identity, your relationships, your sense of meaning and purpose
Religious shame — carrying deep, persistent shame about who you are, what you've done, or what you've felt — shame that was installed by religious teaching and that feels impossible to shake even after you've left
Loss of belonging — the profound isolation that comes when leaving a faith community means losing the people who were your entire social world
Distrust of authority — difficulty trusting leaders, institutions, or even God after being hurt by someone who claimed to represent all of them
Spiritual grief without language — grieving something you chose to leave, and not having permission to grieve it because the people around you don't understand why it was worth grieving in the first place
A Personal Note
I understand religious trauma from the inside — not only as a clinician but as someone who has personally walked through the experience of leaving a religious community and navigating the profound losses and hurts that come with it.
I know what it costs. I know the particular grief of losing not just a belief system but an entire world — the relationships, the identity, the sense of who you are and where you belong. I know what it feels like to have that world close behind you.
I also know, from the other side of that experience, that healing is genuinely possible. That the grief has an end. That it is possible to find community built on honesty and humility rather than control and performance. That you can rebuild a sense of self, a sense of meaning, and a sense of belonging — even after losing all three at once.
That's not a promise that what you lost will be restored the way it was. It's a promise that what you're looking for on the other side of this is real and findable. And that you don't have to carry the weight of what happened to you alone while you look for it.
One of the things I believe most deeply about working with religious trauma in a therapy setting is this: the goal of therapy is never to guide you toward a particular conclusion about God, faith, or religion. The goal is to give you back the freedom to seek — to research, to question, to learn, and to arrive at your own honest truth without fear or coercion driving the process.
That freedom was taken from you. Reclaiming it is part of what healing looks like.
I am a Christian and a pastor outside of my therapy office, and I share that openly because you deserve to know who you are working with. I also want to be equally clear: it is not my role, my desire, or my ethical right as a licensed clinician to impose my personal beliefs on anyone — and especially not on someone who has been wounded by exactly that kind of imposition. The ACA Code of Ethics that governs my practice is explicit on this point, and it aligns completely with my own values. My faith informs my compassion and my humility in this work. It does not determine your conclusions, your path, or your relationship with faith going forward. That belongs entirely to you.
How Therapy Helps With Religious Trauma
Religious trauma responds particularly well to therapeutic approaches that work at the root level — not just symptom management but addressing the underlying beliefs, memories, and patterns the trauma created.
EMDR Therapy is especially effective for processing specific memories of harm — the moment a leader said something that shattered your sense of safety, the experience of being shamed in front of a community, the specific events that broke your trust. EMDR helps the brain reprocess those memories so they lose their emotional charge and stop driving your present responses.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) helps you understand and heal the internal parts that formed in response to religious trauma — the part that carries deep shame, the part that still fears punishment, the part that desperately wants to belong somewhere, the part that is furious at what was done to you. IFS doesn't try to eliminate those parts. It helps them heal.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) addresses the specific beliefs religious trauma instilled — about your worth, about your right to exist as you are, about whether you are safe, about whether you can trust. CBT helps you examine those beliefs honestly and replace what is false with something truer.
Solution-Focused Therapy keeps the work moving forward — building toward the life, the identity, and the sense of self you want to inhabit on the other side of this.
You Don't Have to Figure This Out Alone
Religious trauma is one of the most isolating experiences a person can go through — precisely because the community that might otherwise support you through hard times is often the community you've lost, or the community that caused the harm in the first place.
Therapy is a space where what happened to you can be named without judgment, processed without pressure, and healed at your pace. You don't have to know exactly what you believe or where you're headed. You just have to be willing to show up and see what's possible.
If you're in Utah and you're carrying this, Lionheart Counseling LLC offers religious trauma therapy in-person in Murray and via telehealth throughout the state. A free 15-minute consultation is available to help you decide if this is the right fit.
Learn more about religious trauma therapy at Lionheart Counseling or reach out directly at dax@lionheartcounselingllc.com | (801) 921-7854.
A Recommended Resource
Spiritually Abused by Steve Pierson is one of the most honest and compassionate books written on the experience of spiritual abuse. Pierson writes as both a pastor and a person who understands the ways religious authority can be corrupted and weaponized — and the ways healing and genuine community are still possible. Highly recommended for anyone navigating this territory.
Lionheart Counseling LLC | Murray, Utah | Telehealth available statewide throughout UtahDax Johnson, LCMHC (#13937032-6004) | Licensed under Utah Code 58-60-402 and 58-60-407
Lionheart Counseling LLC provides religious trauma therapy and spiritual abuse counseling to adults in Murray, Salt Lake City, South Jordan, Sandy, Draper, Midvale, West Jordan, Taylorsville, Herriman, Cottonwood Heights, Orem, and Provo, Utah and via telehealth statewide.
