Reclaiming Joy: Why Laughter and Pleasure Are Essential in Religious Trauma Recovery
Healing from religious trauma isn’t just about processing pain, it’s also about reclaiming joy. This blog explores how laughter, pleasure, and everyday moments of delight are vital for recovery, offering practical tips and encouragement to help survivors reconnect with their authentic selves.
Rebuilding Your Identity After Leaving a High-Control Group
When you leave a high-control group you're not just walking away from a belief system you’re stepping out of an identity that was shaped for you. That disorientation you feel isn’t a failure; it’s the beginning of something more honest. This blog explores six practical and compassionate steps for rebuilding your identity after religious trauma or spiritual abuse.
Kind, Smart, and Human: Understanding Cult Dynamics and Recovery
This blog explores how cults target basic human needs like belonging, purpose, and healing, often disguised as love or belonging. We unpack why kind, intelligent people get pulled into high-control religious systems, why having good memories doesn’t erase the harm, and what recovery really looks like after walking away. Whether you're deep in the fog or finding your footing again, this is your reminder: you weren’t weak. You were human. And recovery is possible.
Trauma, the Nervous System & Self-Compassion: A Gentle Guide for the Healing Journey
Trauma lives in the body but so does our capacity to heal. In this gentle and grounded blog, we explore how trauma impacts the nervous system, why regulation isn’t just about breathing exercises, and how self-compassion (even when it feels impossible) is a key part of the recovery journey. This offers education, reflection, and real-life ways to return to safety, one small, messy step at a time.
Cult Tactics: The Art of Recruitment and Retention
You didn’t wake up one day and decide to join a cult. That’s the deception! High-control groups don’t come wearing warning labels. They come cloaked in purpose, belonging, and divine destiny. In this raw and revealing blog, I unpack how recruitment into controlling systems isn’t random — it’s calculated. From childhood indoctrination and love bombing to spiritualised performance and fear-based loyalty, I share how these tactics quietly stole my autonomy and how I found my way back.
Pride as Sacred Resistance.
True inclusion goes beyond tolerance. It means actively creating spaces where LGBTQIA+ people feel seen, heard, and valued. For faith communities, this includes: Publicly affirming queer identities in leadership and teachings. Listening to and centring queer voices. Acknowledging and repenting of past harms. Supporting the mental health and wellbeing of LGBTQIA+ members.
Inclusion is not about compromising beliefs, it’s about embodying the core spiritual principle of love without conditions.
Pride Month - The Wholeness I Found Outside the Church
This reflective Pride Month blog explores the journey of leaving religion and discovering a deeper sense of belonging through queerness. It speaks to the grief, healing, and sacredness of reclaiming identity outside of shame-based faith systems. A gentle, powerful read for anyone navigating religious trauma and queer self-acceptance.
Holding Healing Space: Boundaries & Trust in Religious Trauma Work
Working with clients who’ve experienced religious trauma while carrying your own lived experience is both a powerful gift and a delicate responsibility. This blog explores how to hold sacred space with empathy and integrity, honouring boundaries, rebuilding trust, and making sure the work stays focused on your client’s healing, not your own.
Finding Safety Again: How Havening Supports Religious Trauma Recovery
When you’re healing from the impact of harm experienced in faith spaces, if you’ve been taught you can’t trust your emotions, and your body and desires are unsafe, Havening can support you as you reconnect to yourself.
Havening is a beautiful way home. It’s nurturing and restorative. It’s also been shown to increase emotional resilience and support sleep.
If you’re looking for someone to support you as you make sense of your experience, our Practitioner Registry includes professionals who are experienced in religious trauma recovery and list the therapeutic approaches they use, including Havening. You deserve to feel safe, seen, and supported.
Reclaiming (or Not) Easter: Resurrection, But Make It About You
Easter used to feel like a time to shrink myself—sacrifice, surrender, and somehow be grateful for it. These days, I’m choosing a different kind of resurrection. One that’s about coming back to myself. In this blog, I reflect on the complexities of Easter after leaving faith, and how we might reframe resurrection as a deeply personal act of reclaiming our voice, our joy, and the parts of us that were once lost or left behind. No pressure. Just permission.
When Easter Hurts
Easter can stir deep pain for survivors of religious trauma, often resurfacing old spiritual wounds. This reflection explores how fear-based theology, coercive messages, and self-abandonment shaped the Easter narrative for many, and invites survivors to reclaim the season with gentleness, autonomy, and authenticity.
Deconstructing Purity Culture in Your Relationship
Relationships may change, evolve, or even end during this process, and that's okay. Embrace the freedom to redefine your beliefs about love, sex, and emotional intimacy in a way that feels authentic to you. You may both change throughout this process and that’s ok.
Purity Culture 101: Unpacking the Beliefs, Harm, and Healing
Purity culture, a movement deeply embedded in conservative evangelical Christianity, has caused immense harm by tying self-worth to sexual purity and imposing rigid, fear-based teachings on sexuality. Its impacts are far-reaching, affecting women, men, queer, and trans folks alike. This blog explores the core tenets of purity culture, how it controls bodies and emotions, and the lasting shame it leaves in its wake. It also offers guidance on how to heal from these wounds by reclaiming autonomy, challenging harmful beliefs, and embracing a new, self-defined relationship with sex and intimacy.
Relationships and Religious Trauma
In high-control religious groups, love often comes with fine print. Relationships are deep, intense, and all-encompassing - until you start questioning. Boundaries are discouraged, and belonging is conditional. Leaving means facing isolation and loss, but it also opens the door to rebuilding authentic, unconditional connections. True love doesn’t require surrendering yourself.
Summer Lovin’
February brings a flood of roses and romance, but for those who grew up in purity culture, love and sexuality can feel far more complicated. In this blog, I reflect on my own experience—how a teenage kiss was framed as spiritually dangerous—and the long road to reclaiming my sense of self. If you’ve ever second-guessed your sexuality, struggled with shame, or felt frozen in your own experiences, know you’re not alone. Healing is possible, and there are practitioners, books, and resources that can help.
Spiritual Abuse Awareness Month: Shedding Light on a Silent Struggle
It’s Spiritual Abuse Awareness Month. Spiritual abuse hides in subtle behaviours, using religious authority to control, shame, or manipulate. Its impacts—shame, fear, and identity loss—are deeply tied to religious trauma. This blog explores the harm, the healing, and the hope that survivors can reclaim their voice and story. You are not alone.
What do you need?
It can be mortifying to ask for what you need. Especially if you’ve spent any time in high-control / high-demand faith settings. You learn quickly that the needs of others come before your own and it becomes clear that it’s easier to just not have any.
Finding Freedom in Feeling
Religious trauma often teaches us to fear our emotions, labeling them as too messy, too wrong, or too dangerous to trust. In this blog, I share my journey of reclaiming emotional safety and learning to embrace my feelings as vital signals guiding me toward healing and wholeness.
Christmas, Reimagined: Navigating the Holidays After Religious Trauma
For many survivors of religious trauma, the holiday season isn’t all joy and carols—it’s a time laden with triggers, grief, and complex emotions. Whether it’s the sting of strained family dynamics, the loss of once-beloved traditions, or the pressure to conform to a “perfect” holiday ideal, Christmas can feel more like a challenge than a celebration. This blog explores why the season hits differently for those with religious trauma and offers heartfelt, practical strategies for navigating it with care. From setting boundaries to creating new traditions, this is your guide to reclaiming the holidays on your own terms—messy, imperfect, and wholly yours.
The Layers of Loss: Grief and Religious Trauma
Grief in the context of religious trauma is complex, layered, and often unspoken. It’s not just the loss of faith but also of community, identity, and belonging. This blog dives into the unique challenges of grieving a faith system, exploring the tangled web of sadness, anger, and shame that often accompanies it.