Religious trauma

Religious trauma is real, widespread, and insufficiently acknowledged — the damage done when religion is used not to liberate but to control, to shame, to coerce, to exclude, to terrify. It can come from explicit abuse within religious institutions or from the more diffuse harm of toxic theology — the teaching that you are inherently broken, that your body is dangerous, that doubt is sin, that love is conditional on compliance. Healing from religious trauma does not require either returning to religion or abandoning it permanently — it requires understanding what happened and recovering the self that was there before the harm.