Judith Herman, a CPTSD expert and pioneer, theorized that complex trauma takes place in captivity, where one is a prisoner of sorts, unable to flee the control of a perpetrator. She argues that people are held captive without bars, windows, or guns through psychological tactics or economic forces designed to disempower and disconnect individuals from themselves and others.

In my early years, captivity took place within a family marked by lack, neglect, substance abuse, and mental illness as well as a strict religious system that encouraged suffering. To protect myself, I developed a set of coping skills that served me well for many years, including the ability to push down and ignore the signs of pain and harm. If I didn’t acknowledge the symptoms, then maybe things weren’t so bad after all. By the time I was a young adult, I had mastered the facade of positivity to such a degree that I couldn’t recognize when a symptom was pointing to something serious, and I had lost virtually all connection with my body.

I am keenly interested in our culture’s propensity to shortcut symptoms. We are so ready to adopt models that rely on quick fixes and pain-avoidance techniques instead of substantive solutions to complex problems. We see this all around us in our medical models, religious and education systems, and in the ways we communicate and run organizations. And certainly, this is how we are socialized to deal with trauma. 

We avoid, we deny, we detour, and we numb.

Psychotherapists Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman suggest that symptoms serve as a bridge between struggle and meaning and help us orient ourselves. If that is true, then what happens when we don’t face them head-on, and how does our avoidance disorient us to reality?

We shrink, we stagnate, we deform, and we repeat violence.

I fear we don’t look deep enough to find out the nuggets that the symptom is trying to teach us, both personally and also in our institutions. One solution from Watkins and Shulman is to “wait patiently with a symptom.”  As we wait, we enter into a relationship with struggle in order to mine what is there. This is not the same as how my religion lauded suffering; instead, it is a way to appreciate the brilliance of our body’s systems and what they are trying to tell us. This is a way of relating to symptoms that can, more accurately, be seen as a gift.

We often don’t do well waiting, sitting with our wounds or the wounds of others. It’s in direct opposition to our desire to flee. We want to rush to feel better, to put it all behind us, and move on. Yet, what happens when we pay careful attention to what our bodies are telling us and to what symptoms we are glossing over because it’s just more comfortable?

We heal, we expand, we evolve, and we love.

My vigilant attention to my inner self has been crucial to my freedom from the captivity of complex trauma, and I believe this practice holds a key to bringing health to every system where trauma is perpetuated.

By ripping up the carpet and facing the elephants hiding in plain sight, we can affect the transformation that so many of our relationships, emotions, systems, and organizations need.

I long for the day when we demolish the survival-of-the-fittest mindset and pay attention to the symptoms of our distress. Where we normalize an openness that lets us stop living in fear that our symptoms will expose us as frauds and mark us as inferior. When our organizations engage in a different kind of management style that includes collaboration and creativity over crushing speed and protecting the organization over the people. When families can become incubators of growth, instead of allowing children to remain immature well into adulthood. When leaders can work through personal struggles without the fear that causes them to hide their symptoms and mistreat others until they have become a “testimony,”

——

References

Herman, Judith. 1992. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books.
Watkins, Mary, and Helene Shulman. 2008. Toward Psychologies of Liberation. Basingstoke [England]: Palgrave Macmillan.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Beth Alford

Beth Alford is a communication strategist, writer and independent scholar. Her writing combines her personal experiences of complex trauma with academic work in theology, religious trauma, culture and gender studies. You can find more of Beth’s work at thebethalford.com.

thebethalford.com

Ultimately, it is a personal identity that takes a beating in the aftermath of trauma and where the agency, dignity, and imagination of a flourishing life are short-circuited. 

As survivors, we know this all too well. 

I just completed a year-long integrative project for my Master’s Degree that explored how women rewrite their lives in the aftermath of religious trauma. This has been very personal for me, as my own story of trauma served as the catalyst and the backdrop for this work.

Institutional Control

For this project, I had the privilege to interview nine people who were raised in strict religious systems that were riddled with misogyny and sexist ideas about gender. The indoctrination and tactics of control over these young girls produced classic symptoms of complex trauma. By adulthood, the interviewees had a distorted sense of themselves, severe passivity, trouble with decision-making, and a lack of imagination to consider opportunities outside the rigid ideal someone else had created.  

Their stories reflected my own journey as someone raised in a religious system that demanded conformity of beliefs, thoughts, and actions to such a degree that I had little sense of my own identity. The institutional demands for silence and conformity meant we had to hide the parts of ourselves that others disapproved of including ambitions, desires, and emotions. Those who couldn’t identify with ideal womanhood either internalized the idea that there was something wrong with them, or they worked hard to keep their true selves a secret.

Interviewees reported taking years to recover what was lost in those years of captivity, and most acknowledged, even at midlife or older, that they are still working through their identity issues. 

For most of us, healing comes in fits and starts and in tiny awakenings. 

Those coming out of trauma are desperate for wholeness and hopeful they can return to a semblance of normalcy. But instead of returning to an old draft of ourselves, the key seems to be to revise and write new narratives. 

A Complex Healing

Judith Herman’s work on Complex Trauma has been instrumental in this work and helped me connect the dots between my experiences within religion and the trauma I feel in my body. Her research shows that a victim of chronic trauma may feel like she is irrevocably changed or she may lose the sense that she has any self at all.

Even after release from captivity, the victim cannot assume her former identity. Whatever new identity she develops in freedom must include the memory of her enslaved self. Her page of her body must include a body that can be controlled and violated. Her image of herself in relation to others must include a person who can lose and be lost to others. And her moral ideas must coexist with the knowledge of the capacity for evil, both within others and within herself. If, under duress, she has betrayed her own principles or has sacrificed other people, she now has to live with the image of herself as an accomplice of the perpetrator, a “broken” person. The result for most victims is a contaminated identity. Victims may be preoccupied with shame, self loathing, and a sense of failure. 

On first reading, Herman’s words feel bleak; suggesting that maybe healing isn’t possible. But as I reflect longer, I see the truth and the beauty that lies in the reality of our lives as trauma survivors. We cannot return to before.

For those of us raised in traumatic situations, there is no ‘before’

We can work through the shame, the sense of failure that works to contaminate, and gain skills of resilience and agency. But what of wearing our scars without shame? Our trauma is part of our identity as survivors, but often we spend so much time trying to escape the ugly parts we don’t even notice the way they have woven into our identities.

I also see in Herman’s words something I haven’t seen before –  a call to embrace the beauty of the marred body/spirit. Instead of trying to escape to a new identity free from the horror, how might I re-imagine myself with the scars? How do I make peace with the complexity of my own moral ideals in tension with my (and others’) capacity for evil? I have been living with a contaminated identity because I haven’t been able to conceive a more complex (and true) image of myself.

New Narratives

I am currently playing around with writing as a metaphorical framework for how to think about recovery. More than a cognitive exercise, this is a creative and artistic path that allows us the freedom to explore, play, erase, and rewrite as we hone the concept of our true selves. This framework has brought an important energy to my journey and gives me room to imagine and embrace the complexity of who I am.

By choosing to write and rewrite our lives, either literally or metaphorically, we are standing in protest against the domination of religious experience that values absolutes, reason and right answers over imagination, messiness and the lives of people. Writing new lives is a way to exercise and grow our agency for the sake of our own liberation, to break free from the rigid constraints that have kept us from our true selves.

For those of us learning to trust ourselves and giving ourselves permission to play with ideas and identity, we can rewrite our lives with conviction and abandon and reimagine a God-human story that feels more real to our experience and can work as a catalyst for a new way to think about ourselves and the world. This new way forward means writing for ourselves with our own voices, ambitions, and desires and not simply letting others write our story.

References – Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery, (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 94.

Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog post do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Beth Alford

Beth Alford is a communication strategist, writer and independent scholar. Her writing combines her personal experiences of complex trauma with academic work in theology, religious trauma, culture and gender studies. You can find more of Beth’s work at thebethalford.com.

thebethalford.com

So what happens when it’s religion itself that is the source of distress and trauma? 

Researchers have studied harm and abuse inside cults for years, but these environments were usually differentiated from mainline religious groups. With new reports of abuse and trauma coming out of Christian churches in recent years, people are looking deeper at the similarity between high-control Christian groups and cults, and when affinity to doctrine crosses a line and becomes dangerous. 

Increasingly, researchers, clinicians, and survivors are calling this religious trauma.

When I first began researching this topic I felt uneasy about using such a strong term. After all, not all religion inflicts trauma. Even within the same denominations or churches, people experience religion differently, similar to when two people go off to war and only one develops PTSD.

But, after learning about complex trauma and listening to dozens of stories through research interviews, I have come to believe that religious trauma is definitely something that is bringing harm to a great deal of people.   

Religious Trauma

Dr. Marlene Winell was the first person to use the term Religious Trauma Syndrome to describe the wide array of emotional issues people face as they leave authoritarian religions; psychological harm including fear, anger, depression, loss of self, agency, and decision-making. 

After her own experience coming out of fundamentalism, Winell began to notice similar issues with her therapy patients and has focused her entire practice on helping victims and training other professionals in how to work with religious trauma ever since.. 

Religious trauma is different from spiritual abuse, though it can include abuse. It refers to the overlying religious system that is characterized by captivity, and psychological domination and results in an erosion of the personality, characteristics of Complex PTSD outlined by Judith Herman in her groundbreaking work, Trauma and Recovery. 

Herman introduces the concept of complex trauma that goes beyond single event-driven experiences to include prolonged and repeated events that create a psychological impact of subordination inside institutional, political, and domestic systems. 

When looking through Herman’s prism of captivity, domination and personality erosion, there is a clear connection between the symptoms of religious trauma and Complex PTSD. 

Captivity

For Herman, complex trauma takes place in captivity where individuals are in a prison of sorts and under the control of a perpetrator. Perpetrators might be a parent, partner, leader, organization, government, or even God who becomes the dominant force in the life of the victim and shapes her world and her identity. 

People can be held captive without bars, windows, or guns through psychological tactics or economic forces. This type of coercion can show up in obvious ways such as in governmental or police states, but also in more subtle ways inside families and religious institutions. 

Psychological Domination

Inside a system of captivity, perpetrators exert domination through techniques designed to disempower and disconnect individuals from themselves and others. Often in religion, the tactics include Biblical literalism, fear, and shame. The subtle nature of this domination is what makes it so pervasive and dangerous because it allows people who wouldn’t otherwise condone violence or abuse to dismiss it or turn a blind eye. 

Erosion of Personality

The result of captivity and psychological domination is a perversion of identity where there is a loss of self and helplessness, passivity, entrapment to the past, intractable depression, somatic complaints, and smoldering anger. 

People subjected to prolonged, repeated trauma develop an insidious, progressive form of post-traumatic stress disorder that invades and erodes the personality. While a victim of chronic trauma may feel after the event that he is ‘not herself’, the victim of chronic trauma may feel herself be changed irrevocably, or she may lose the sense that she has any self at all. (Herman)

In my research, I heard story after story from people who felt this profound identity loss or distortion coming out of Christian fundamentalism. 

Connecting the Dots

Herman’s categories of captivity, psychological domination, and the erosion of personality are evident in Marlene Winell’s descriptions of religious trauma indicated in the chart below. 

This is, of course, an oversimplified summary but is an important primer for those beginning to make connections with what their body is telling them and the current trauma science.  

Religious Trauma Resources

The field of religious trauma is exploding and new resources are constantly being created. For more information or to connect with a professional, you can access these religious trauma resources. 

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REFERENCES

• Almendros, Carmen, Manuel Gámez-Guadix, Álvaro Rodríguez-Carballeira, and José Antonio Carrobles. “Assessment of psychological abuse in manipulative groups.” International Journal of Cultic Studies 2 (2011).
• Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
• Joshua Pease, “The Sin of silence”, Washington Post Online, 2028, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/05/31/feature/the-epidemic-of-denial-about-sexual-abuse-in-the-evangelical-church/
• Winell, Marlene. Leaving the Fold. Apocryphile Press, 2001.
• Image credit: Patrick Fore on Unsplash

Guest Post Disclaimer: Any and all information shared in this guest blog post is intended for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog post, nor any content on CPTSDfoundation.org, is a supplement for or supersedes the relationship and direction of your medical or mental health providers. Thoughts, ideas, or opinions expressed by the writer of this guest blog do not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation. For more information, see our Privacy Policy and Full Disclaimer.

Beth Alford

Beth Alford is a communication strategist, writer and independent scholar. Her writing combines her personal experiences of complex trauma with academic work in theology, religious trauma, culture and gender studies. You can find more of Beth’s work at thebethalford.com.

thebethalford.com