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.