EMDR Therapy for Religious Trauma

Maybe it’s been a couple years since you moved through your faith transition. You haven’t been going to church, your social circle has expanded, your religious and political views have shifted, and you’re feeling pretty happy with your life. Then you go back home to visit your family for the 4th of July and drive past your old church building. All of a sudden you get a flush of heat through your chest and face and your mind starts to feel fuzzy. 

What the heck was that? You haven’t thought about that place in months, years even. You’re just trying to enjoy a long weekend catching up with people you love. But that feeling lingers for the rest of the afternoon and you can’t quite shake it all the way. 

This is what it means when people say “the body keeps the score.” Your thoughts and beliefs have shifted and you feel content but something is trapped in your body and nervous system that still needs attention and space to heal. 

Religious trauma can’t be solved by a change of mind alone.

Religious trauma isn't stored as a set of beliefs you can rationalize your way out of. Experiences become trauma when they are too much, too soon, or too fast for our nervous systems to process on their own. It becomes stored in your body, and your body needs its own kind of processing to heal. EMDR therapy for religious trauma works because it works with the body, emotions, and mind to heal what has become stuck.

Religious trauma is encoded with authority attached, which makes it stick differently than other memories.

High-control religious communities place a heavy emphasis on authority structure and people in positions of authority are often treated as a funnel for the voice of God. This means that experiences under these authoritative relationships hold a lot of weight, trust is often implied, and the betrayal of those relationships cuts especially deep.

When trauma is inflicted by someone (or something) positioned as ultimate truth.

Religious trauma can come from the direct treatment of someone (like a pastor or a parent) or from  doctrine itself (like teaching that being gay is a sin). Those messages, when given by someone who holds authority or is positioned as the infallible word of God, are woven into the way your brain and your nervous system function. The messaging and experiences are viewed as non-negotiable and God-ordained so your nervous system has to find ways to work around them, even when the experience was painful or harmful to you.

When fear and reverence work together.

Fearing God and religious authority figures is often taught as a sign of reverence or respect. This can easily become confusing when anxiety or a sense that things don’t feel right enters the room. Questioning authority, anxiety or discomfort are often viewed as reasons to further submit to the community’s rules, framework, and hierarchy rather than a signal to slow down and consider what is happening and why. This creates reinforcement in the nervous system that the correct response to discontentment is to return to the source of harm. 

Why insight alone isn’t always enough.

With people who have survived religious trauma or gone through faith deconstruction there is often a big disconnect between what the mind thinks and believes and how the body and emotions react. You can know that a doctrine was harmful or that a pastor was manipulative, make changes to your beliefs or leave a community, and still experience that bodily alarm when you encounter reminders of those things.

Bilateral stimulation helps the brain finish processing what got stuck.

A quick primer on EMDR: It stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing and is a therapy that uses bilateral stimulation (alternately engaging the right and left side of your body) to help the brain process traumatic or harmful experiences. It helps the brain reorganize memories from being traumatic to more neutral, historical events that no longer have an impact.

What is bilateral stimulation, actually?

Bilateral stimulation means we are engaging the left side and the right side of the body (and therefore the brain) alternatly. Right, left, right, left. As the name suggests, in EMDR this is often done with eye movements. You as the client move your eyes from right to left while thinking about the target memory. Other options include holding small objects that buzz in your hands, tapping yourself on the shoulders or knees, or sounds through headphones that alternate from ear to ear. In an EMDR session we will test out the options and you get to choose the one that feels best to you.

How do I know what memory to think about?

There is a process in EMDR for choosing which memories would be helpful to re-process. Often, they are memories that when you bring them up still hold an emotional charge. Maybe it is difficult to talk about it without tearing up, for example. In EMDR therapy for religious trauma, there are probably several memories that could benefit from reprocessing, so we’ll make a list and work through them throughout the therapy process. We can also work backwards from a current experience to uncover what past experiences are still stuck. In the example from the start of this blog, we would use that as a jumping off point to find what other experiences created a similar sense (heat flushing to your face and chest and the fuzzy feeling in your mind).

How is EMDR different from talk therapy?

Before getting into this, I want to be clear: talk therapy can be very helpful. There is power in sharing your story, especially when it is met with empathy and validation. Talking about your experiences can bring insight and help you feel empowered. EMDR is a trauma therapy that brings in another level of healing, helping ensure that the new narrative and felt sense in the body and emotions are aligned. 

Healing must include the body.

You can do the work of deconstruction. Read the books, ask the hard questions, walk away from beliefs that never actually served you. And still, something happens when a particular song plays while you’re scanning the radio on a road trip, or someone uses a certain tone of voice, or a phrase from an old sermon surfaces in conversation. Shame shows up. Or dread. Or a wave of panic you can't quite explain, given that you know better now.

This doesn’t necessarily mean you haven’t fully deconstructed or that time in therapy so far has been wasted. It's a sign that your body is still holding what your mind already let go of.

When the body catches up, things start to shift. The reaction that used to hijack your whole afternoon becomes something you notice and move through instead. It might stop showing up at all. How you respond in a triggering moment becomes a choice rather than a nervous system takeover. Safety stops being something you argue yourself into and starts being something you actually feel.

This is the same reason autonomy matters so much in this work. The goal was never to hand your body a new authority telling it what's safe now. The goal is your own nervous system arriving there on its own terms, in its own time.

One thing to notice this week

You don't need an EMDR session to start paying attention to this gap. This week, notice the moments when your mind says one thing and your body says another. Maybe you tell yourself a visit home is fine, and your shoulders creep up around your ears anyway. Maybe you know a phone call with a parent will go okay, and your stomach knots before you even pick up.

You don't have to fix or explain it in the moment. Just notice it, and if it helps, jot it down. That gap is data, not proof that something is wrong with you. It's often exactly the kind of information a good EMDR therapist uses to help your body finish what your mind already started.

What’s next?

Not every EMDR therapist in Denver understands religious trauma the way it needs to be understood. The authority dynamics, the tangle of fear and reverence, the way doctrine gets stored in the body right alongside memory, these things call for a therapist who has actually done this specific work, not just a general trauma background.

If you're curious what it's like to work with an EMDR therapist for religious trauma, book a free consultation call and let's talk about what's still stuck and what it could look like to finally include your whole self in the healing.