Religious Trauma Therapy
Resolve Your Religious Trauma and Experience Safety, Vitality, and Connection.
Religious Trauma Can Leave You Feeling Powerless and Disconnected.
I help survivors resolve religious trauma so they can live a life of vitality, meaning, and connection.
It's difficult enough to find a therapist, you shouldn't have to educate them about religious trauma.
Hi, my name is Brian.
I’m a licensed clinical social worker, my pronouns are he/him, and I understand religious trauma.
You deserve to work with someone who understands the life-altering impact of adverse religious experiences.
Not only do I get it, I’ve devoted my professional life to helping survivors resolve their religious trauma.
An Embodied Approach to Resolving Religious Trauma
Body
Support your body’s innate ability to resolve religious trauma with somatic-based skills and practices.
Mind
Transform your narrative and undermine toxic beliefs with embodied awareness and experiences.
Combined
Integrate your newfound safety, vitality, and connection into an embodied life you can love.
Religious Trauma
Can Feel Overwhelming
In fact, overwhelmed may be the most concise way to describe trauma — an experience that was more than your nervous system could handle at the time.
Religious Trauma is trauma experienced in a religious context or as a result of religious beliefs, practices, or structures.
Religious trauma often results from experiences when you were unable to do what was necessary to defend yourself or to escape to safety.
There’s an unresolved quality to trauma that continues to exist in your body until it’s resolved.
It’s Possible to Resolve Religious Trauma.
Take the next step
1. Choose a time that works for you
Book a consultation online 24/7. It’s easier than a phone call or email.
2. Connect for a consultation
You’ll feel at ease knowing I value your experience and autonomy.
3. Discover a context of safety
Feel empowered within a context of safety as you begin your journey.
You Can’t Think Yourself Out of Religious Trauma.
Resolving religious trauma requires more than deconstructing harmful beliefs.
Toxic religious beliefs, practices, and structures result in trauma when your nervous system perceives them as threats and triggers a physiological survival response.
The resulting religious trauma doesn’t exist as thoughts in your mind, it exists as unresolved survival physiology in your nervous system.
This is why resolving religious trauma requires more than deconstructing harmful beliefs.
Resolving religious trauma is more than talk therapy.
There’s value in sharing your story, however trauma does not live in your narrative alone.
Within many religious traditions, there’s an emphasis on thoughts, beliefs, and narratives. You get the impression that reality exists within these mental constructs, and your body cannot be trusted as a source of knowledge about the world.
What’s often overlooked is the reality that you live within a body that prioritizes your survival. When it comes to survival, your body doesn’t care about your story, it only wants to be safe.
Religious trauma is more than the story of what happened
Trauma is more than the event(s) you experienced
Religious trauma is the physiological response to events that overwhelmed your nervous system
This is why cognitive approaches to trauma are often ineffective.
You can’t think yourself out of trauma
You can’t talk yourself into feeling safe unless your body feels safe
Your body doesn’t care about logic and reason
Resolving religious trauma requires an embodied approach that honors your body’s need to feel safe. Talk therapy can be helpful once trauma is resolved, particularly when it comes to integrating your new-found safety into a narrative that reflects your post-traumatic growth.
Religious trauma doesn’t exist in the doctrine of hell — it exists in your survival response to the doctrine.
An embodied approach to resolving religious trauma
Countless individuals have experienced trauma related to the doctrine of hell, which makes it a great example to illustrate an embodied approach to religious trauma.
I can’t tell you how many folks have deconstructed the idea of hell to the point they no longer believe it exists. However, they still have a trauma response to hell. Why is that?
Religious trauma doesn’t exist in the doctrine of hell — it exists in your survival response to the doctrine.
Kids are exposed to depictions of violence in the books they read and the stories they hear without experiencing trauma. Why then does the story of hell result in religious trauma?
It’s not because hell is real
It’s not because the story is more compelling
It’s not even because you believe it’s real
Hell is the source of religious trauma because of a survival response to a perceived threat.
I remember white-knuckling the pew in front of me when I encountered the threat of hell. My body needed to defend myself or escape to safety, but that wasn’t an option. So, my nervous system did the only thing available to me in that moment — it went into freeze collapse.
This survival response persisted as an underlying feeling of powerlessness long after the threat was gone. My mind knew I was safe from a hell I no longer believed in, but my body needed to feel safe before it would let down it’s guard.
I couldn’t deconstruct the trauma away, because it didn’t exist in my mind — the trauma existed in my body.
An embodied approach to religious trauma takes into account what our bodies need to feel safe again (or for the first time). There’s a focus on questions like:
What does my body need to feel a little bit stronger, safer, and more connected?
What did I need to do then?
What can I do now to complete that survival response?
Most of us know what it’s like to have a visceral response to a difficult memory — increased heart rate, sweating, rapid breathing, etc. It makes sense that our nervous system responds to perceived threats.
However, we may be less familiar with the powerful physiological response of our perceived strength, aggression, and power. We know what it’s like to feel small and powerless in response to a memory — what if we could feel strong?
This amazing resource is central to resolving religious trauma with an embodied approach. Our nervous systems are capable of undermining what we learned about the world back then with new experiences we embody in the present.
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
-Mary Oliver
You deserve to feel safe in the world.
I would be honored to help you make this a reality.
-Brian Peck, LCSW