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Praying

Religious Trauma - It's a Thing

Did you grow up believing

  • There was something really wrong with you

  • You should not question the Bible

  • You heart could not be trusted

  • Your body would betray you

  • You better get married so you can finally have sex

  • You must be born again or saved, in order to get to heaven 

  • You must always honour your parents, even if they are not honourable 

  • You would be going to hell, if it weren't for Jesus - he's the great rescuer

Why We Need to Heal From It

Believing there is something really wrong with you is a trauma response. The result of deeply internalizing our supposed sinfulness is that we learn to never trust our own feelings, instincts, desires or longings. We never trust or get to know who we are. We out-source our own personal power. We give over control of our sexuality. I know because I did it too. I built a whole life on being who god wanted me to be and then I had to discover the life I was actually made to live. This was the collision of my two selves, the one I had created based on fear and shoulds, and the one I was now longing to live, based on discovering my OWN truth.  

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We must each take this journey from being 'children to the father' (god), to true adulthood which is no longer being a child but an autonomous adult who knows and trusts his or her own heart and truth.

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Our church experience actually modelled co-dependence. We learned that we are perpetual victims of our sinful nature, satan, and even the very world, and that we need rescuing and saving from ourselves. This is not true. Take this journey and discover the gift that is you, and how you might actually save yourself. Discover also, your soul, the gift you bring to the world, and how you might go from child of the divine to equal with the divine, from parent/child, rescuer/victim to equal reciprocity with the Mystery that is always around us, in us and is, in fact, us.

 

 That's where healing our religious trauma will take us, to the very heart of ourselves and to the world. 

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