Holding Healing Space: Boundaries & Trust in Religious Trauma Work

Navigating Boundaries When You’ve Been There Too: Holding Space Without Making It Yours

When you’ve lived it, you just know. The coded language, the nuanced silence, the weight of what isn’t being said.

As a therapist, coach, or practitioner with lived experience of religious trauma, this work can hit differently. You understand the grief that defies neat stages, the disorientation of identity loss, and the slow, hopeful reconstruction of something that resembles freedom.

You know what it’s like to feel terrified of your own thoughts. To second-guess your intuition because you were taught that your heart is deceitful. To grieve the God you were told to love — and to feel guilty for grieving at all.

So when a client walks into your room and begins to unravel a story you’ve also lived, it’s not theoretical for you. It’s personal. It’s cellular. You get it in your bones.

And that can be both a profound gift and a significant responsibility.

The Tension Between Empathy and Projection

There’s a unique kind of resonance that happens when you share lived experience with your client. It’s that moment when someone says, “You probably won’t understand this, but…” — and you do. Completely.

This resonance can build trust quickly. It can provide relief to clients who are tired of having to explain, translate, or justify their experience to well-meaning professionals who don’t understand the dynamics of high-control faith systems.

But here’s the tension:

Shared Experience is not the same as Shared Processing

Your role as a practitioner is not to lead your client down the same road you’ve walked, but to walk alongside them on theirs — no matter how similar or different it may look.

Lived experience doesn’t make you the authority on their healing.
It simply gives you a deeper sense of compassion and attunement if you can stay grounded in your own inner work.

This is where boundaries become essential. Not as walls that block connection, but as gentle guide rails that keep the space safe — for them, not for you.

Boundaries That Protect the Healing Space

Here are some key boundary practices that help practitioners with lived experience honour both their empathy and their ethics:

Pause Before Self-Disclosure

Before you share a piece of your own story, ask yourself:

• Is this for their benefit, or mine?

• Will this support their healing, or shift the focus to me?

• Am I trying to fix, rescue, or relate?

Sometimes, self-disclosure can normalise and validate, but if it comes from a place of unprocessed pain or a need to be seen, it can create confusion, even enmeshment. When in doubt, less is more.

Name the Lens Without Making Assumptions

It’s okay to let your clients know you understand certain experiences from the inside but always hold your story lightly. What felt empowering to you may feel triggering to them and what gave you clarity may deepen their confusion.

Our job is not to map our path onto theirs, but to honour the uniqueness of their process.

Stay Curious, Not Conclusive

Your healing journey may have led you out of religion altogether, or maybe it’s helped you reframe your faith in new, expansive ways. Either way, your path is one path, not the path.

If a client is wrestling with questions that you’ve already answered for yourself, resist the urge to guide them toward your conclusions. Stay curious, let them wrestle, and offer them your safe presence.

Supervision Is Non-Negotiable

Working with religious trauma brings up big emotions, complex transference dynamics, and deep personal triggers, especially if the stories you’re holding echo your own.

Having a supervisor or mentor who understands spiritual abuse and religious trauma can gently challenge your blind spots. You need a place to debrief, reflect, and unpack the emotional toll of this work.

Tend to Your Own Healing Outside the Room

You are still healing, too, and that’s okay, but your clients can’t be your therapy. They are not responsible for your grief, your rage, or your longing for closure.

Make sure you have safe, supportive spaces - peers, friends, therapists, supervisors - where you can fall apart, ask questions, and feel held and heard.

Boundaries are not a betrayal of authenticity, they are an act of respect that allows us to show up fully present, without making the space about us.

Rebuilding Trust When It Was Weaponised Against You

Let’s shift into what this work looks like from the client’s perspective, because for many survivors of religious trauma, therapy is not just a space for talking. It’s a battleground for reclaiming trust. Trust in you as the therapist, but also trust in themselves and their own perceptions of their body, their instincts, and their right to exist without apology.

For those coming out of high-control religious systems, trust was conditional, manipulated, and often used against them. Vulnerability was demanded, not invited, and loyalty was expected, not earned.

So, when they walk into therapy, they’re not bringing a blank slate, they’re bringing a nervous system that flinches at care, a heart that’s been taught to fear its own voice, and a history that’s confused coercion with compassion.

Here’s what trauma-informed trust-building can look like with this population:

Go Slow, On Purpose:

In fundamentalist or authoritarian faith spaces, emotional intimacy was often forced under the guise of “transparency” or “surrender.” So pushing for vulnerability early in therapy can feel eerily familiar, and not in a good way.

We go slow.
We invite rather than expect.
We honour resistance as wisdom.

Trust isn’t built through speed; it’s built through safety.

Name the Power Dynamic:

Religious trauma often comes from hierarchies that were framed as sacred: pastor/congregant, husband/wife, God/follower.

Therapy can unconsciously mirror these dynamics unless we name them.

That’s why I say things like:

“You don’t have to agree with me.”

“You get to say no here.”

“I don’t hold answers, I hold space.”

When we deconstruct hierarchy in the therapy room, we permit clients to take up space in their own lives again, all while keeping a very close eye on our own power in that space as the professional.

Validate Doubt:

Many clients were taught that doubt is dangerous, that questioning is a slippery slope, and that curiosity is rebellion.

So, when they say, “I’m not sure what I believe anymore,” the most healing thing you can say might be: “That makes so much sense, and you don’t have to figure it all out right now.”

In this space, doubt isn’t a threat to faith, it’s a portal to authenticity.

Listen to the Nervous System:

Some clients will freeze when you ask how they feel. Others might avoid eye contact, change the subject, or intellectualise everything.

This isn’t resistance. This is protection.
Their nervous system has been shaped by years of spiritual performance, suppression, and fear of being “found out.”

Trust their body. Trust your pace. And trust that regulation is repair.

Hold Space for Spiritual Confusion:

Not every client wants to walk away from faith. Some want to stay, but differently. Others want nothing to do with religion again, but still ache for something spiritual.

This in-between space can feel isolating and disorienting. Let it be messy, let them not know, and support them to make the room they need to breathe.

Final Thoughts: Holding Sacred Space with Integrity

Religious trauma work is holy ground. It’s slow, tender, gritty, and deeply personal, and it asks a lot from those of us who carry our own stories into the room.

But it also offers something profound, not just to our clients, but to us.

Every time we honour someone’s pace, we rewrite a script.
Every time we witness their pain without rushing to fix it, we undo a lie.
Every time we sit quietly in the uncertainty, we make room for healing that is truly our own.

This is healing work.

Whether you’re a practitioner learning how to hold space without losing yourself, or a client daring to trust again after spiritual betrayal, know this:

You are not too much.
You are not too broken.
And it’s okay to take your time.

There is something inside you that is wise, kind, and worthy of listening to.

And that, more than anything, is what this work is about.