Religious trauma lives in the body long after you’ve left the building. Here’s what actually helps — and why peer support works when other approaches make it worse.

“If my body is a house, then spiritual trauma means that my house is haunted and that God is the ghost.” Holy Hurt podcast.

Maybe you’ve felt it for a while — that something is wrong in the house. A heaviness in the rooms. Doors you’ve learned not to open. A feeling you can’t quite name but your body has been trying to tell you for years.
Maybe you’re still inside, pretending not to notice. Maybe you’ve already fled and you’re standing on the lawn, disoriented, grieving something you can’t fully explain yet. Maybe it’s been years and you still flinch at certain sounds. Or maybe you’re watching someone you love refuse to come out, and you don’t know what to do with that.
Wherever you are, I want to say the thing no one said to me when I needed it most:
You’re not crazy. The house really is haunted.
Religious trauma does something particular to a person. It doesn’t just hurt — it convinces you that the hurting is your fault. That if you confessed more, believed harder, trusted longer, the heaviness would lift. So you go back to the very thing causing the harm and ask it to heal you. And when it doesn’t work, you feel more broken than before.
I know this because I lived it. I grew up in a haunted house. I’ve watched people I love stand guard at doors they’re terrified to open, exhausted, certain that keeping them closed is keeping them safe. I read horror novels as a teenager because they were the only stories that told the truth — that something can be genuinely wrong in a house, that the fear is legitimate, and that it’s possible to face what’s behind the door and survive it.
You might not recognize what you’re carrying.
Religious trauma doesn’t always announce itself. It doesn’t always look like obvious abuse or a single terrible event. Sometimes it looks like years of slow erosion. A theology that told you your worth was conditional. A community where belonging required performance. A God who was more judge than refuge.
And it lives in the body long after you’ve left the building.
Some of what you might be carrying: difficulty making decisions — because you were taught not to trust yourself. Difficulty trusting others — because trust was weaponized. Not knowing who you are or what you like — because your identity was so enmeshed with the institution that leaving felt like losing yourself entirely. Stomach issues. Dissociation. Avoidance. A loop of self-blame that kicks in every time something goes wrong. Constantly questioning whether you can trust your own perception.
That last one is the one nobody talks about enough. The way spiritual trauma teaches you to override your own knowing. To defer. To doubt the very instincts that are trying to protect you.
Your body has been telling you the truth the whole time. The work is learning to listen to it again.
Why the usual help often makes it worse.
I want to say this plainly, because I’ve witnessed it happening.
When someone carrying religious trauma goes to a therapist or counselor who reintroduces the framework that caused the harm — who suggests imagining Jesus in the room, or frames healing in terms of forgiveness and returning to faith, or treats the spiritual dimension as separate from the psychological wound — it doesn’t help. It does further damage. Because it sends the message that the thing that hurt you is also the thing that will fix you.
The ghost cannot cast out the ghost.
This isn’t an indictment of all therapy or all faith. It’s an honest account of what happens when the treatment doesn’t match the wound. Religious trauma requires someone who understands the specific mechanisms of spiritual harm. The way shame gets weaponized. The way community is used as leverage. The way doctrine can function as a system that keeps you circling the same ground without ever getting free.
Going back into that system — even a gentler version of it — can feel like walking back into a haunted house and being told the ghosts are your friends.
Why you need a room full of people who understand.
Here’s what I’ve found actually helps. Not as a theory. As someone who has lived it and sat with others living it.
Being believed. Fully, without qualification.
Not performing okayness. Not having to explain why you’re still affected. Not starting from scratch every time with someone who needs the whole backstory before they can meet you where you are.
There is something that happens in a group of people who have lived inside the same kind of house. A recognition. A relaxing of the guard. You say something you’ve never said out loud and someone across the room nods — not with pity, not with advice, just with knowing. And something in your nervous system registers: I am not alone in this. I am not crazy. The house really was haunted.
That moment — that simple, unglamorous moment of being recognized — is where healing begins. Not in a technique. Not in a framework. In the presence of another person who doesn’t need you to be further along than you are.
Groups work because isolation is one of the primary weapons of religious trauma. The system keeps you separated, ashamed, certain that your experience is unique and shameful and best kept quiet. A room full of people who’ve been through it dismantles that lie without anyone having to say a word about it.

But sometimes for those of us who have survived this kind of trauma a group can be too much.
What I offer individuals.
What I offer isn’t therapy. It isn’t pastoral care. It’s something older and more honest than either.
I sit beside you. Not above you. I don’t have a destination picked out for your healing, no doctrine you need to return to, no timeline you’re failing to meet. I’ve lived in this kind of house. I’m not diagnosing you from outside.
And I won’t reintroduce the very thing that caused the harm.
What I’ve seen bring real relief — not fix, not cure, but genuine relief — is simply this: someone finally believing what you experienced. Not having to perform okayness anymore. Your body getting to tell the truth, maybe for the first time.
A note on recovery.
I don’t think we ever completely heal from this. I want to be honest about that because I think false promises of complete recovery are their own kind of harm.
What I believe in is relief. In the weight becoming lighter. In the flinching becoming less frequent. In knowing yourself again — slowly, imperfectly, on your own terms. In building a life that has room in it for who you actually are rather than who you were told to be.
That’s not a destination. It’s a direction. And you don’t have to walk it alone.
There is a door out of this. You don’t have to know what’s on the other side yet. You just have to know the door exists.
—
I used to love horror movies. Still do. There’s something about a story where someone walks into a haunted house, takes the haunting seriously, and stays — like Ed and Lorraine Warren in The Conjuring, who believed people when no one else would — that always felt like coming home to me. I think I understand why now.
I’ve lived in haunted houses. I know what the atmosphere feels like in my body before I can even name it. The heaviness. The rooms you learn not to enter. The constant guarding.
But I’ve also walked into a home that wasn’t haunted.
My cousin in Newfoundland has a picture on his wall. A handstitched Polish proverb: Gość w domu, Bóg w domu. A guest in the home, God in the home.

The same faith I’d seen used to control and surveil. But in his house it produced something entirely different. Peace. Presence. Enough room for everyone. My body knew the moment I walked in.
The difference wasn’t the theology. It was the spirit underneath it. One house uses God to watch over you. The other welcomes you as if welcoming you is itself a holy act.
That’s what I’m trying to build with A Liminal Space. Not a theology. Not a program. Just a house with enough room. Where the haunting gets named. Where you are believed. Where your arrival is itself enough.
A guest in the home. That’s all. Come in.

If something here resonates and you want to learn more, I’d love to hear from you. No commitment. Just a conversation. Reach out to: loriwilliamslimnalspace@gmail.com.