How Religious Trauma can Impact our Relationship to our Bodies

One of the long term and lingering impacts of religious trauma can be a complicated relationship with our own bodies and emotional experience. Religious trauma results from an experience with a religious organization, institute, or individual, that disrupts our beliefs, values, and even our sense of self. Often folks receive messages that they should trust leadership over their own instincts, causing them to become disconnected from their emotional experience, and even their own sense of truth. In addition, it is not uncommon for the body to be touted as “sinful”, something that needs to be conquered, or mastered, and that indulging our bodies is a sign of moral weakness or the result of some sort of deep character flaw. All of these messages can lead us to become profoundly disconnected from our bodies.

This is particularly challenging when it comes to understanding and processing our emotions. Emotions are felt sensations experienced in our bodies. Nothing makes this clearer than seeing a baby express their feelings. We are all born this way, with biologically wired-in core emotions including anger, fear, sadness, excitement, disgust, and more. When we become disconnected from our bodies, it becomes difficult to feel our emotions, let alone understand what they are connected to, or process them. As a result, we are missing out on critical information about ourselves and our experience of the world.

Let me give you an example…

Imagine you are assigned female at birth, and raised in a religiously conservative church and family context. This environment is constantly signaling to you that to be a good girl you need to be quiet, calm, helpful, submissive, patient, and self-sacrificing. This environment also highly values domestic skills, childcare, and caretaking labour in general. You are rewarded for these behaviours, and moments of prioritizing your own needs or wants result in you being called selfish or undisciplined. Maybe you’re even asked to repent or ask for forgiveness for your ‘outbursts’. Now let’s imagine that you are also someone who naturally gravitates towards sports. You love being active, and you’re good at it. You love feeling the excitement and energy of competition and team work, and it feels good to feel strong in your body. You want to be an athlete, but this doesn’t fit into the framework of calm, quiet submission that your community values. You are feeling pressured to conform…getting messages that your athleticism is ‘tomboyish’ and unattractive. One can see how easily in this example you might be pressured to give up what you love to fit into your community and ignore your body saying no to the things that don’t feel good. Because frustration or annoyance, or even anger, are labelled as outbursts, you are not comfortable expressing or even connecting to these feelings so you don’t know how to stand up for yourself. You find yourself moving further and further away from what you truly love and what feels good to you, leaving you more and more disconnected from your body.

Unfortunately, examples like this are all too common. What happens to all of those emotions that never got to be expressed? What happens to all the times we had to swallow the word ‘No’, or try to contort ourselves to fit into a box that didn’t suit us at all? When there is no space to process or express those feelings they get stuck in our body, and can end up causing all sorts of problems including anxiety, gut issues, autoimmune disorders, chronic pain, inflammation, depression, feelings of helplessness and more.

Often folks come to therapy asking for strategies or tools to manage symptoms of anxiety or depression, without realizing that those symptoms are actually showing a pathway to access all of the emotion that has never been seen and is bubbling just under the surface. When we are taught our bodies need to be controlled, then allowing these feelings to surface naturally, in the way we were made to, can become the source of constant inner conflict. It can even feel unsafe, or scary to allow our emotions to be experienced. Our bodies end up having additional frustration directed towards them, because as they get louder to try to get our attention so that the underlying hurts can be addressed, we try harder and harder to control them. You can see how this becomes very complicated very quickly, and tricky to untangle, especially alone.

Healing this relationship to ourselves, and addressing how we feel towards our bodies and why can be a critical part of healing spiritual trauma, and also creating new ways to process and feel our full emotional experience of the world. Our bodies are amazing! They tell us so much about who we are and how we are connected to each other, the world, and our lives. If you are on the journey of reconnecting to your body and your emotions, we at the Collective would love to support you.

This work is such an honour, please know you’re not alone in what you’re feeling. I’ve been there and this is something I have had to work through too. I grew up in a high control evangelical Christian environment where women were not allowed to be in positions of leadership. To this day, I am still untangling all the ways this has limited how much space I allow myself to take up in the world and in my own life. I know I would have not gotten here without help. Part of what makes reaching out for help challenging, is it can come with a lot of shame, or an idea that something is wrong with you for not knowing how to sort this out by yourself. You weren’t meant to sort it out by yourself, and having a space to talk through what you’re experiencing with someone who understands can be transformative. Take it from someone who knows firsthand! If this has you curious, reach out today, I’d love to have a chat with you.