Religious Trauma and Spiritual Injury
My career foundation includes being an ordained clergy member who chose a path of chaplaincy in public health facilities. I am also an authorized trainer with the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education's Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy (ACPE-SIP) program, helping other therapists learn to work with religion and spirituality in treatment.
Harm that happens inside a religious or spiritual setting carries something extra with it. The place meant to hold your deepest sense of meaning, value, and safety is the same place where the injury occurred. That can make it hard to name, hard to leave behind, and hard to bring to a therapist.
For most people, religious and spiritual life is a source of meaning, belonging, comfort, and moral grounding. This page is not about judging healthy religious life. It is about specific harm some people have experienced within religious settings and what can be done about it.
I work with adults affected by harm in religious families, communities, relationships, or institutions. That includes people who have left a tradition, people who are currently questioning, and people whose faith remains central to their lives and who want to work on what happened.
What This Work Addresses
Therapists sometimes use the phrase “adverse religious experiences” as a way of naming what happened without putting an entire tradition on trial. The same community can be a refuge for one person and a source of real harm to another. Patterns of harm can cross traditions: high-control dynamics, unaccountable authority, shame-based teaching, and the enforcement of belonging through exclusion.
I work with people from a wide range of religious backgrounds, and the tradition involved matters far less than what happened to you within it. Some of what people bring includes:
Neither religious trauma nor moral injury is a formal diagnosis. Religious Trauma Syndrome, a term associated with psychologist Marlene Winell, does not appear in the DSM, but the experiences it describes are recognizable in clinical work, and trauma-focused treatment may be helpful.
Moral injury refers to the psychological, spiritual, and social effects of being involved in, failing to prevent, witnessing, or being betrayed by actions that violate deeply held moral beliefs. In a religious context, this can include carrying responsibility for something you were made part of, staying silent about harm you witnessed, or discovering that leadership protected the institution instead of the person who was hurt.
How It Shows Up Later
These experiences can continue affecting the nervous system long after the original situation has ended. People often describe:
People often understand intellectually that a teaching was harmful and may still feel it as true. Insight alone may not fully close that gap. Trauma-focused work that goes beyond words may be helpful for some people.
You do not have to leave your faith to do this work
This is worth saying clearly because it keeps some people from reaching out: you do not have to leave your faith or community to do this work.
I try to create a space where you are welcome to bring both your beliefs and your history of harm. I will not steer you toward any particular outcome for your beliefs. Where you land is yours to decide, whether you are questioning, rebuilding after leaving, or staying exactly where you are.
We can look at what happened without the session becoming a referendum on religion in either direction. If your tradition holds resources you want to draw on, we can use them. If you would rather leave that out, that works too.
Why it can be hard to bring to therapy
Some people avoid therapy altogether because they worry their concerns will turn into a debate rather than a focus for healing. Others have had a therapist treat their faith itself as the problem, or simply not understand why the harm could not be resolved within the community where it occurred.
How I Work With This
We start with what happened, what it cost you, and what is still affecting you now. Pacing matters, especially when the harm involved someone you trusted or an entire community. The work may include:
Not everyone needs all of this, and I do not assume every difficult religious experience amounts to trauma. Some people primarily need a place to talk it through with someone who takes it seriously.
My pages on EMDR, Deep Brain Reorienting, and Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy describe those approaches in more detail.
What Change Can Look Like
Over time, people may describe:
Is This Work Right for You?
This work may fit if you are an adult carrying the effects of harm in religious or spiritual settings, whether the harm was recent or happened decades ago, and whether or not you still identify with the tradition involved.
What I offer is psychotherapy. If you are seeking spiritual direction, pastoral counseling, or guidance from within a particular tradition, another practitioner may be a better fit for those needs.
If you are currently in an acute mental health crisis, need intensive addiction or crisis stabilization services, or are court-ordered to attend therapy, a different setting will serve you better right now.
Getting Started
You do not need to have it all figured out before reaching out. We can figure out where to start together.
I offer a free phone consultation. You can reach me at 845-202-9774 or through the contact page.
I see clients in person at my Suffern, NY office and via telehealth throughout New York State and Florida.
Curious if this feels like the right fit?
I invite you to start with a consultation. There is no pressure, just a conversation to see whether working together makes sense.