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Understanding Religious Trauma Syndrome: It’s Time to Recognize It [View all]
I'm really struggling and am desperate never to go back to the religion I was raised in, but I no longer want to live in fear or depression. It seems that I am walking through the jungle alone with my machete; no one to share my crazy and sometimes scary thoughts with.
After years of depression, anxiety, anger, and finally a week in a psychiatric hospital a year ago, I am now trying to pick up the pieces and put them together into something that makes sense. I'm confused. My whole identity is a shredded, tangled mess. I am in utter turmoil.
These comments are not unusual for people suffering with Religious Trauma Syndrome, or RTS. Religious trauma? Isnt religion supposed to be helpful, or at least benign? In the case of fundamentalist beliefs, people expect that choosing to leave a childhood faith is like giving up Santa Claus a little sad but basically a matter of growing up.
But religious indoctrination can be hugely damaging, and making the break from an authoritarian kind of religion can definitely be traumatic. It involves a complete upheaval of a persons construction of reality, including the self, other people, life, the future, everything. People unfamiliar with it, including therapists, have trouble appreciating the sheer terror it can create and the recovery needed.
http://www.babcp.com/Review/RTS-Its-Time-to-Recognize-it.aspx
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Understanding Religious Trauma Syndrome: It’s Time to Recognize It [View all]
Warren Stupidity
Aug 2015
OP
Some religions teach about "hell". Some people believe in the existence of "hell".
guillaumeb
Aug 2015
#54
All mass murderers are outliers. Jim Jones and Joseph Stalin are both outliers.
guillaumeb
Aug 2015
#34
I saw people complaining upthread of mistreatment by million+ member american churches.
AtheistCrusader
Aug 2015
#35
If a church organization or a corporation discriminates against a particular class
guillaumeb
Aug 2015
#36
possibly in an attempt to profit from "treating" a "disorder" that she created?
guillaumeb
Aug 2015
#8
Yeah, sounds like a syndrome the tele-evangelists would use to solicit donations.
goldent
Aug 2015
#37