Therapy for Religious Trauma
LGBTQIA+ Affirming Therapy
Sacramento and online in California
Recovering from Religious Trauma
Guilt is a constant presence in your life. You beat yourself up about every mistake or perceived harm.
You spent so long being told to put others first and set aside your own needs that you feel guilt if you try to express your needs or do something that benefits yourself. Or you have a hard time even identifying your own needs.
You want to enjoy sex and intimacy but feel overwhelmed by shame, freeze up, or go numb.
You feel unsure how to talk about sex with a partner.
You’ve worked hard to feel proud of your identity but sometimes struggle with anxiety or internalized shame.
You worry about how to navigate relationships with family or community members who may not be affirming of your identity.
You feel lost without the community and sense of purpose that you previously found through religion.
You’re grieving the parts of your religious community that you did appreciate. You are trying to figure out what community and social support will look like going forward.
You are unsure who you are or what you actually believe because you spent so long being told what to believe.
Therapy for religious trauma can you help you find your voice, connect with your sense of self, and build stronger relationships.
Finding Your Sense of Self
After years of internalizing messages about how you "should" be living your life, you’re trying to build a life that feels authentic to you and your identity.
Finding your sense of self can include:
Exploring who you are and what your values are
Identifying your needs and what you want your life to look like.
Building supportive relationships.
If you’ve been in a long-term relationship, this may include shifting old relationship patterns.
Deconstructing what you were taught to believe and wrestling with what you actually do believe.
If desired, the chance to build your own relationship with religion and spirituality, on your own terms.
Approach to Therapy for Religious Trauma
-
You may feel like you spent your life being told who you should be and how you should be acting. Narrative therapy helps you recognize the stories you’ve been telling yourself, determine whether these stories are still serving you, and re-author your life story to one that better serves you. Narrative therapy can you help you deconstruct what you were told to believe.
-
Parts work, informed by internal family systems, can help you understand the different parts of you that took on protective roles to help you survive. This may include parts that feel guilty, self-critical, avoidant, or perfectionist.
Underneath these protective parts are more vulnerable parts of you, parts that often carry the pain of past experiences.
In therapy, we’ll work to increase compassion for your protective parts and build the emotional safety to connect with the more vulnerable parts of your experience.
-
Experiences of religious trauma can lead to feeling numb or disconnected from your body. If this is the cause, we’ll explore mindfulness-based exercises or interventions that will help you learn to be more connected with your body.
-
You may have learned to suppress your emotions and your needs. Experiential therapy helps you connect with your emotional experiences. Instead of just telling a narrative of events and analyzing (or intellectualizing) them, you’ll be guided to explore what is happening on an emotional level. Over time, you’ll be guided to express the emotions you’ve been holding inside (in other words, feeling your feelings).
-
We’ll explore how past life experiences, relationships, and unconscious patterns continue to shape your life. You’ll be guided to make sense of these experiences and increase your ability to make decisions that help you live your life in a more authentic way.
What to Expect
-
Deconstructing and Unpacking Internalized Messages
In therapy, we’ll slow things down to notice:
The stories you automatically tell yourself
The expectations you’ve been carrying
The emotions underneath those stories and expectations
If you an LGBTQ+ person, you may have internalized negative messages about your LGBTQ+ identity. We’ll look at what messages you have internalized about LGBTQ+ identity, how these impact you, and identify how you would prefer to view your identity.
Deconstruction involves looking at the messages and beliefs that you would told to believe and deciding what still feels meaningful to you. You’ll be guided to identify how religious has impacted how you view yourself, your relationships, your identity, and your actions. This process will help you connect with how you want to see yourself and how you want to experience the world.
-
Finding Your Values, Community, and Sense of Identity
1) Finding and defining your own, personally meaningful values can be an important step in religious trauma recovery. You may previously have been told what your values should be and many of these may not align with current-day you. Knowing your own personal values can help you build a sense of direction.
2) Building supportive community can help you feel less alone, especially if you are missing the sense of community you previously found from religious communities.
3) Your past experiences may have tried to tell you what your identity should be. Now, you get to define who you are.
-
Expressing Your Needs and Building an Authentic Life
Past life experiences have often left the impression that certain emotions aren’t safe to feel. You may have learned to hide your sadness, push away your anger, or ignore your own needs. You may have been told to put everyone else first or that having needs is selfish.
Through therapy, you can build the emotional safety to make space to express your inner emotions. As you recover from religious trauma, it is normal to feel anger, grief, and confusion. Therapy can help you make sense of their feelings.
Therapy can also help you build trust in yourself, so that you confidently identify and express your needs.
FAQs
-
Religious trauma is the psychological harm done caused by harmful religious experiences. Harmful religious experiences may include high control or coercive environments, shame-based messaging, or abuse from religious leaders. It can also include messaging that LGBTQ+ identity is sinful and being shunned if you try to leave the religious group
-
I will not tell you what to believe or steer you toward or away from religion. Your beliefs and values are yours. Therapy for religious trauma focuses on how these experiences impacted your sense of self, your nervous system, and your relationships, and on helping you build self-trust. I will give you the tools to help explore what you do or do not believe, but I will not tell you what you should believe.
-
Some of the impacts of religious trauma include:
Being uncertain of your sense of identity
Overwhelming guilt or shame if you deviate from the religious messaging
Internalized shame about your LGBTQ+ identity
Having a hard time trusting yourself, thinking independently, or identifying your needs
Hypervigilance, numbness, or feeling disconnected from your body
-
This practice is a good fit for adults seeking trauma therapy that goes beyond coping skills and symptom management, and instead delves deep into their experiences. Many of my clients are looking for an LGBTQ+ affirming therapist; are recovering from religious, relational, or childhood trauma; and want to understand and change long-standing emotional and relationship patterns.
-
My style is compassionate, authentic, honest, and direct.
We’ll begin by getting to know you, exploring your history, your relationships, and beginning to recognize the ways you’ve learned to survive.
As we get to know each other, I’ll point out things you may not be noticing yourself. When helpful, I believe in the power of care-frontation: being direct and challenging you in a way that comes from care, compassion, and curiosity.
-
This practice may not be the best fit if you’re currently experiencing an acute mental health crisis or need intensive structure and stabilization. Please see my Resources page for a list of support that can better serve your current needs.
-
Andy Price provides LGBTQ+ affirming therapy for religious trauma in person in Sacramento and online across California.
-
I offer convenient online scheduling. If you’re ready to get started, go here to schedule your first session. If you have any questions, feel free to email me at andy@andypricetherapy.com
Hi, I’m Andy (they/them)
I’m a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. I am passionate about helping people build authentic, connected, and affirming relationships—with themselves, their partners, and their communities.
I specialize in working with queer and trans individuals, couples, and non-monogamous relationships, supporting them as they navigate challenges of identity, sex and intimacy, religious and relational trauma, relationships, political stressors, and life’s tough moments.
Beyond my clinical work, I’m a researcher and speaker. My research centers queer and trans well-being and relationships. I have presented at professional and academic conferences on topics such as gender identity, LGBTQIA+ chosen family, and experiential and narrative therapy.
I value authentically showing up as myself, which means I’ll show you my personality, share my sense of humor with you, and also sit with you in moments of pain. I hope that authentically showing up as myself empowers you to authentically be yourself.