Freedom from Toxic Religion
Reclaim your life from the tendrils of toxic religion with Forward-Facing®️
Whether it’s been 3 months or 20 years since you left your religion, you may be learning about religious trauma because you finally started putting the puzzle pieces together: the things you believed about God, yourself, and your community have messed with your ability to feel safe in your own skin.
And if that’s the case, I’m sure it’s messing with your entire life:
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It makes you afraid to be yourself – whoever that is.
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It makes not knowing things feel like the world’s going to end, so you ruminate over information-gathering instead of living in the moment.
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It makes relationships with other people feel dangerous, so you read the room instead of yourself.
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It makes the idea of belonging in a group and being loved for who you are a fanciful pipedream, so you perform for love, believing sacrificing your well-being for others is the best love you’re going to get.
At best, the tendrils of toxic religion are an ever-looming presence, slithering their way into everyday life, constantly questioning your sense of self and safety.
At worst, they choke you, keeping you from living the life you survived for – convincing you it’s not possible or not worth it.
The more you try to theorize your way out of traumatic stress, the more you reinforce the idea that there’s something wrong with you, and the cycle continues.
Because traumatic stress lives in our nervous systems, not just our minds.
Learning to release traumatic stress through your body in everyday life will get you so much further than trying to think your way out of it.
Ready to trade overthinking for peace of mind?
The Freedom from Toxic Religion workshop is for nerds who love the research, but are ready to go beyond theory and start practicing skills.
This is not for people looking to fill their heads with more information – though there will be plenty of information.
It’s for people who are ready to create change now.
If that sounds like you, join us online Sunday July 23 from 12- 8 ET (9-5 PT)
Freedom from Toxic Religion gives you opportunities to connect with others while you develop recovery skills.
This LIVE workshop on Sunday July 23, from 12-8 ET (9-5 PT) is:
Totally online
– so wear your pjs and bring some pancakes. How else should you be spending a Sunday?
A full day workshop
– so you have time for discussion, practice and space to let new information sink in.
Accompanied by a fillable digital workbook
– we’ll work on some things together, and you’ll have some pages to take home with you for more practice
Inherently relational
You will have multiple opportunities to discuss what you’re learning in small groups, so you may make a friend or two throughout the day.
Focused on practicality and hope
You already know what religious trauma has done to you, so let’s do something about it!
I’m not here to offer you a magic bullet. That’s just as bad as trying to convince you just one more altar call will fix all your problems.
I’m not going to pretend that religious trauma is simple or easy to resolve.
Your time in toxic religion changed you.
If you’re like me, you’ve still got those narratives creeping around in the back of your nervous system:
“I’m a bad person.”
“I have to pay penance for existing.”
“I hurt people even when I don’t mean to and that further proves my badness.”
“I have to be hypervigilant in every moment to make sure I don’t mess things up for myself or others.”
“God has opinions about every aspect of my life and I’ll be doomed if I don’t heed them.”
Maybe you’ve spent time picking these apart. Learning how to logic your way out of it. Studying the intricacies of scriptural interpretation or modern science or trauma theory. Desperately trying to convince yourself to be the person you were before the toxic religion got its thorny vines into your brain.
And maybe who you were without toxic religion never existed. Maybe you lived your life indoctrinated from day one and you never got a chance to find out who you’d be without it.
It’s okay. You’re in good company.
In this workshop, you get to join others who’ve experienced toxic religion to develop recovery skills that relax your mind through how you relate to your body.
After this workshop, you will walk away with concrete Forward-Facing skills that give you:
Peace of Mind
from understanding not only why your bodymind responds the way it does, but also what to do about it.
Agency
to direct your own recovery process in everyday life so you can feel empowered instead of confused
Capacity
to heal outside a therapist’s office, coaching call, or support group (though these skills will enhance your ability to wring the goodness out of those spaces as well) so you can invest finances into your recovery process more efficiently
Opportunity
to connect with others instead of trying to control them so that you can pursue relationships that nurture you while having the clarity of self to walk away from people and behavior that only cause you more harm.
Body-awareness
so you can bring all the knowledge you’ve already gleaned about toxic religion and trauma into your body in order to feel safe in your own skin – even when faced with uncertainty.
And these skills are yours to keep from the moment you learn them.
Ready to join us?
Sunday July 23, 12pm-8pm ET
$75
What counts as toxic religion and how can that lead to trauma?
Toxic religion is any religion or religious experience in which the use of spirituality, a sense of connectedness, or a search for belonging is exploited in order to gain control of religious members.
If someone or some group took advantage of your spirituality, your inherent humanness, for their own gain including control over your time, control over your money, control over your belief system including political action, control over your emotions, your sexuality, your parenting, your skillset, you’ve experienced toxic religion.
And that control is often gained using fear. That’s where the trauma comes in. Toxic religious cultures manufacture threats, scare humans with them, and then resolve the fear with involvement in their religion’s aims. Religious trauma is when the control techniques from the toxic religious culture stick around in your body even after you’ve left.
How do I know if I have religious trauma?
My short definition of religious trauma is “when your body believes in hell longer than your mind does.”
Of course, that’s an imperfect definition in many ways. A lot of people aren’t instilled with a fear of hell, but rather a fear of abandoment of the community/God, disfellowshipping, outer darkness, becoming unworthy, or just proving that yes, they are in fact trash just like the religion said.
So perhaps another way to describe this is that anyone who has violent/controlling teachings from being part of a religious group still affecting how they perceive themselves and what they do in their lives is dealing with some kind of religious trauma.
It’s also worth noting that religious trauma is not a diagnosable disorder. PTSD is a diagnosable disorder, but you don’t have to have PTSD to experience traumatic stress.
Anyone whose painful past learning (of any kind) intrudes into their present reality experiences traumatic stress – that’s all of us. If some of your traumatic stress happens to come from your experiences in a toxic religion, this workshop will be helpful to you.
Is this therapy?
Nope! But it doesn’t have to be therapy to be therapeutic.
This workshop is not about diagnosing, curing, or treating any conditions. Rather, it’s about gathering people who have experienced toxic religion and working together to develop skills that can help you recover.
Sometimes when people are looking for therapy, they’re looking for a listening ear, psychoeducation, and skill development more than a diagnosis and treatment plan. If that’s you, this may be a good fit.
What is Forward-Facing®️?
Developed by traumatologist, Dr. Eric Gentry, Forward-Facing®️ is the heart of what I’ll be teaching in this workshop. It involves pairing self-regulation of the nervous system with clearly articulated intention.
Self-regulation directly addresses the need to see trauma as a body-oriented experience.
Intention gives us a reason to develop and utilize recovery skills instead of falling into trauma responses.
And Forward-Facing®️ skills not only help those dealing with traumatic stress, they help anyone optimize their lives to be less affected by stress of any kind.
Does it matter which religious tradition I come from?
Nope! Toxic religion has more to do with process than content, and the effects of toxic religion, including paths, to recovery can be similar no matter which faith was used to exploit or devalue you.
I come from fundamentalist evangelicalism, but there are many similarities across other groups. I’ve worked with exJWs, exMormons, people leaving orthodox Judaism, and people leaving more fringey cults with a lot of similar control techniques in addition to people leaving evangelical fundamentalism and catholicism. If you’re background isn’t on that list, you are still welcome, and will learn skills that will help you recover.
SPECIAL DEAL: Sign up before July 1, 2023 and get access to my online course,