How To Overcome Religious PTSD

Of all the varieties of post-traumatic stress a person can carry, the kind rooted in religion may be the heaviest. Across the centuries, a case can be made that organized faith has caused more suffering than relief. There were the Crusades long ago, and in our own time there has been public hate speech. On top of that sits a strange relationship with sex. Catholic priests and other clergy swear off marriage entirely, and plenty of believers flinch at the mere mention of the word. A few churches push it further, lifting lines from Paul and Jesus out of their setting to shame someone for simply wanting to marry. And it isn't only sex that gets treated this way; nearly anything good, when it could be used well, gets labeled dangerous. What follows is about using personal growth and self-development to work your way out of the trauma that religion can leave behind.

I don't want to paint faith as all bad. In the second chapter of James, written by a half-brother of Jesus (same mother, different fathers), the author says there is such a thing as true religion. He describes it as staying unstained by the world and caring for widows and orphans. Have you ever actually seen that version? If so, it's probably like most genuinely good things: tucked away, findable only if you go looking hard.

I'll give the Catholics credit. Volunteering at a homeless shelter, I watched many of them feed and clothe people with no strings attached. Some who trace their line to Martin Luther's Protestant Reformation showed up with food too, though they paired it with warnings about how wicked everyone was and demands to repent and accept Jesus. Jesus himself said you would know people by their fruit. The believers who tend to look most like him are often the more liberal Christians, the ones out in their neighborhoods doing the work. St. Francis of Assisi put it well: preach the gospel, and when all else fails, use words.

The psychological wreckage done in religion's name shouldn't surprise anyone. Among Christians, and mostly from Protestants, there is a pattern of verbal and emotional abuse built on the idea that humbling a person means breaking them down, as if they'll rebuild later after years of therapy spent relearning how to love themselves. Elsewhere you have people who flew planes into buildings. A Jewish writer once pointed out that neither group represented true Christianity or true Islam, because at its core religion is supposed to be about peace. Fanatics are not the faithful. The Crusades, when you strip them down, were one set of fanatics swinging at another. Even in scripture it was the religious authorities who moved against Jesus and eventually killed him, hoping to stop the crowd forming around him. In the physical sense they won. In the spiritual sense they didn't.

Maybe you were raised in a devout home and were put down for years, taught to be afraid of your own self. So how do you climb out of that? The first step may take years: a real commitment to personal growth. That mostly means getting acquainted with who you are and feeding yourself honest, positive affirmations. The second step is harder. You have to be willing to question the beliefs handed to you as a child.

Something odd happens when you do. As you train your brain to notice the good more often, the cortex region strengthens, and you grow more resilient when life gets rough. Compassion rises. Judgment of others falls. Which, if you think about it, sounds closer to Christ than much of what passes for "religious" behavior.

From there you start seeing more of the good around you, and you realize people aren't the monsters you were warned about. Loving them gets easier, though only after you've learned to love yourself first. That order matters. You cannot pour love into others or into God while running on empty, and years of absorbing nothing but doom and gloom leaves you empty. Breaking free of that dogma takes a stubborn, ongoing commitment to developing yourself.

Studying science helps too. Many Protestants, leaning on faith-alone theology, wall faith off from everything else. But you can dig into science and come away with a deeper fondness for the world. Plenty of people never stop believing in God just because they learn how things work; for some, the study strengthens their faith rather than dissolving it. Part of why so much of society feels dulled down these days is that people have stopped studying math and science. Understanding the mechanics underneath things is what makes life start to make sense. Religion is often treated as the enemy of science, but it doesn't have to be. You just have to be committed enough to your own growth to stop forcing the two apart.

- Erwin Wooten