While the relationship between religion and science is complex, studies increasingly show the beneficial role of religious practices and beliefs in fostering mental well-being. Religion influences behavior, changes perception, reduces anxiety and self-blame, provides support and accountability, and enhances self-awareness. However, religion can be a double-edged sword, as extremism can distort its principles and cause harm.
It is worth noting that while mainstream religions are hardly traumatic, practices vary even within similar faiths. Extremism exists in all religions and affects followers differently. People with
religious trauma experience psychological and emotional harm, enough to interfere with their quality of life. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is an excellent intervention for complex, insidious trauma due to repeated religious or spiritual abuse.
What is Religious or Spiritual Trauma?
Religious trauma is a complex form of traumatic experiences from a faith-based system characterized by captivity and psychological domination, which erodes personality. Religious trauma is distinct from spiritual abuse. However, abuse is part and parcel of the trauma.
Spiritual abuse entails the use of faith to gain control. It involves persistent verbal, emotional, and physical coercion and manipulation. Spiritual abuse is as mentally destructive as religious trauma. Its impact morphs into complex trauma.
The system of abuse imprisons unsuspecting victims, not in physical detainment areas or using weapons, but psychological cells. The degree of coercion distorts reason and robs victims of their sense of self. Perpetrators are not just leaders. They also include parents, partners, or even a deity. Religion also uses a subtle nature of domination that is perversive and dangerous, as it slowly encroaches on a person’s freedoms.
The takeover eventually erodes your personality, making you passive over extreme doctrine, which may include murder and violence. The rules and punitive measures create learned helplessness, depression, anger, and complex trauma to the point of identity loss.
How Does Religion and Spirituality Turn Traumatic?
Religious or spiritual strain and negative religious coping can trigger or worsen trauma-related disorders. Religious trauma develops from:
● An altered perception of a deity – feelings of displeasing God or being punished or abandoned by God can induce significant anxiety, depression, and trauma-related disorders.
● Exposure to or committing morally injurious acts – instances where faith conflicts with morality turn belief into a spiritual struggle. It can turn people against the religious community, families, and friends.
● Doctrinal conflicts – religion can have a firm stance on issues like forgiveness, morality, and more, with repercussions such as excommunication for members who fail to meet the standards.
● Wrestling with thorny religious questions – misunderstanding or misinterpreting religious texts and practices can lead to spiritual struggles because of the impracticality of the demands.
● Abuse – cults are rife with harmful rules and punishments that inflict significant fear and trauma on dissenters. Part of the demands include cutting off family, friends, and society to gain exclusivity in the religious sect.
Understanding EMDR Therapy
EMDR is a psychotherapy that rectifies distorted emotional memory that develops after traumatic experiences. The science behind this therapy lies in understanding how the hippocampus is involved in creating and storing memories. It uses the Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model, which states that trauma produces isolated emotional memory networks attached to warped cues.
EMDR therapy employs two main techniques: recalling traumatic memories and bilateral stimulation. The goal is to reprocess these fragmented memories, allowing them to integrate into healthier, more adaptive memory networks.
The Science of Trauma
Repeated exposure to distressing events alters the size and functioning of brain areas responsible for regulating emotional memory.
● The amygdala, part of the brain responsible for sensing and processing distressful sensations, reduces in size and becomes hypervigilant and hypersensitive to subsequent stressors. It also initiates the stress response every time it detects distress.
● The hippocampus reduces in size and malfunctions, producing improperly processed memories that cannot integrate with healthy memory networks.
● The stress circuit bypasses the prefrontal cortex, interfering with a person’s ability to use logic or reason through the distorted emotional memory, resulting in intrusive thoughts and emotions in the form of flashbacks, nightmares, vivid memories, uncontrollable reactions to trauma-related memories, and heightened reactivity to distressing memories.
How Does EMDR Eliminate Religious or Spiritual Trauma?
EMDR therapy reprocesses distressing memories by combining memory recollection with bilateral stimulation. Throughout an EMDR session, the therapist will guide you to concentrate on a chosen traumatic memory as they administer bilateral stimulation. There are three forms of bilateral stimulation:
● Visual stimulation – the therapist uses a finger or object to move the eye from left to right.
● Audio stimulation – uses sound alternating rhythmically between the ears from left to right.
● Tactile stimulation – uses tapping on the palm of your hands or knees to excite memory-forming networks.
Bilateral stimulation engages the targeted, fragmented memory network. This activation encourages the hippocampus to reprocess the memory, facilitating its integration into a healthy memory system. The reprocessed memory no longer triggers or maintains a stress response, and it does not interfere with the prefrontal cortex's ability to think clearly, making it less distressing.
Unlike talk therapy, EMDR does not necessitate a detailed exploration or understanding of the traumatic event. Instead, it prepares the mind to more readily accept therapeutic interventions, as well as the development of adaptive cognitive
How Long Does EMDR Therapy Take?
A typical EMDR therapy course involves 6 to 12 sessions, each lasting between 60 and 90 minutes. Some patients experience such immediate relief after the initial EMDR sessions that they may not need to complete the course. The therapy has little to no side effects for patients with trauma-related disorders.
Disempower Your Religious or Spiritual Trauma Today
You do not have to carry the wounds and distress from your religious experience. It is possible to stop hurting. You can unburden yourself from the mental, emotional, and physical anguish,
anger, fear, and shame with EMDR therapy. All it takes is a few sessions with a certified EMDR therapist. The road to recovery is beyond reach. Start your journey today.