Submission made 29th July 2025

In September 2024, Counsellors Jane Kennedy, Samantha Sellers and Elise Heerde founded The Religious Trauma Collective – Australia & New Zealand, in response to the gap in support available for people experiencing religious trauma. 

The Collective is a public registry for therapeutic support from practitioners working in the religious trauma space and also provides resources such as books, podcasts and academic articles for people to access, to guide their journey out of high-control, high-demand religious groups and insular cult groups. We also host an annual event bringing together Australian and New Zealand voices and creating a broader network of support.

As conveners of the Collective, we have lived experience of being part of high-control groups. As Counsellors, we specialise in supporting people who have left, been excommunicated from, or are leaving these groups across Australia and New Zealand. The practitioners on our registry work with people from groups that have representation, governing bodies, congregations, or gatherings of some kind in Victoria. While high-control and coercive groups can form around any topic, wellbeing for example, our focus is faith-based religious groups as this is our experience and what we see in practice. 

Religious trauma is not well understood within the counselling space, other allied health and medical sectors, or in our shared public language around faith-based communities in Australia. There is a significant gap in this understanding. There is no agreed-upon term or diagnosis to describe religious trauma and it does not exist in internationally recognised references such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM). 

We use the term religious trauma to place the impact of the trauma we see in the counselling space within the framing of high-control and high-demand, faith-based and religious settings. 

Belonging to, or affiliation with, a religious group is often viewed as a support or a resource for people and while this of course can be true, the shadow side may feel inappropriate to question in order to avoid appearing judgemental or discriminatory. In the same way as culture or belief systems feel personal to people, allied health and medical practitioners often shy away from considering if certain religious groups are abusive, predatory or cult-like, potentially missing key signs that an individual is being or has been manipulated and controlled. As a result, literacy around religious harm and recognition of coercive behaviours in religious groups is lacking at the community level. 

Trauma training for counsellors and allied health practitioners does not include the impact of religious trauma and the academic literature is scant in regard to harms experienced in faith-based settings, especially in the Australian context, although this is rapidly changing. 

Practitioners may understand religious scrupulosity, the well-documented impact of harm experienced by LGBTQIA+ people in religious communities, or the impact of abuse by clergy given the decades-long history of investigations into the Catholic church for example. Certainly the 2013 Royal Commission intoInstitutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse saw a change in public awareness and perception of harms in Australian religious settings. What is lesser known is the harm done by coercion in groups where manipulation and control may be ongoing and pervasive but not necessarily linked to a one-time event or obvious injury. Adding to the complexity, in most cases, this harm is not illegal. Toxic beliefs and doctrines such as eternal conscious torment and Armageddon cause harm in these settings within the context of the coercive behaviours that enforce them and make belonging contingent upon them.

Informally and in popular culture, we see terms such as spiritual or religious abuse, spiritual trauma, church hurt and in 2017 we saw the hashtag #churchtoo to describe sexual abuse with the church following the revival of the #metoo movement that same year. We see public outrage and changes at state policy level to stop queer conversion practices for example and see implosions of megachurches or other scandals in the media around financial misappropriation. What is harder to grasp and appreciate is that people don’t join high-control groups or cults where these harms are clearly seen, they join communities where they can be known and belong. They then find these damaging behaviours were hidden, denied or justified and belonging is threatened when people raise questions or challenge authority.

Due to the nature of coercive control, clients don’t usually come into therapy with language for their experience and it can take time to build trust and establish the root cause of their distress as it relates to religious trauma. People who express concerns in high-control groups are “individualised”, pathologised and named as the problem so the group need not take responsibility. Indeed, part of coercion in these settings is the often explicit “othering” of therapy outside the particular group’s context. Clients often come in saying they are anxious as they were warned not to seek “secular” counselling, having been told it would corrupt them and be outside of the group or God’s best interest for their lives, opening them up to something dangerous. 

In many high-control faith spaces, an alternative to secular counselling is offered, “pastoral counselling”. While pastoral care has a place and acts as a support in practical ways, pastoral counselling is often delivered by those unqualified to provide counselling, and can contribute to the harm people experience in these settings. This can include; advising women to forgive and return to abusive marriages, conversion practices imposed on LGBTQIA+ people, exorcising demons and evil spirits or telling people who have experienced sexual abuse or bullying they must have played a part in their experience and are somehow to blame. Grooming behaviours thrive in pastoral counselling settings and the advice of the pastoral counsellor becomes conflated with the “word of the Lord”.

With broader community understanding in recent years around coercive control in intimate partner relationships, we find clients are starting to be able to see that this is what they have experienced in a religious community setting. In the same way as the intimate partner coercion models show, these groups, to varying degrees, influence or control peoples’ time, finances, relationships, sexuality, vocational choices, access to information, social engagement and sense of self or identity. Both models are highly gendered, with women experiencing significant harm due to prescriptive gender roles that limit opportunity and promote submission. Within this model it becomes clearer how predatory behaviours are possible and how loss of autonomy takes place over time.

As this model applies to religious trauma and harm done in high-control, faith-based groups we see the following recruitment and retention tactics:

• Coercive Indoctrination of Children and Adolescents - From a young age, children are taught to fear outsiders, distrust their own instincts, and obey authority without question. This early indoctrination normalises control in the hopes of creating lifelong loyalty for those raised in the system.

• Love Bombing - Newcomers are flooded with attention, affirmation, and inclusion to create emotional dependency, often mistaking intense early acceptance as genuine belonging. This initial euphoria forms the hook that makes future control and manipulation easier to rationalise or overlook.

• Psychological and Emotional Control - Through guilt, fear, shame, and threats of spiritual failure or eternal punishment, these groups manipulate members’ thoughts and emotions to enforce compliance and eliminate critical thinking. Over time, people internalise these controls as moral or spiritual obligations.

• Leadership Hierarchy and Patriarchal Power Dynamics - These groups often promote rigid, male-dominated leadership structures where authority is unquestioned and divine, making it difficult for members, especially women, to challenge abuse or inequality. Power flows downward, not outward, reinforcing dependency and silencing dissent.

• Financial Giving by All Is Expected and Constantly Reinforced - Financial giving or the handing over of assets is framed as spiritual mandates or tests of faith, with pressure applied through sermons, testimonies, and public giving. Members are often shamed for withholding money or assets, while leaders often live comfortably from the offerings of the faithful.

• Labour Exploitation - Volunteering is often positioned as “serving God,” but the expectation to sacrifice time, energy, and even livelihoods becomes exploitative. Members regularly take on unpaid roles that would be paid in any other setting, often at great personal cost.

• Surveillance and Conformity - Peer reporting, leadership check-ins, and spiritual “accountability” measures are used to monitor behaviour, beliefs, and relationships. Non-conformity is quickly noticed and addressed, fostering fear, self-surveillance, self-censorship, and a culture of control masquerading as care.

• Grooming, Sexual Assault, Institutional Betrayal, and Suppression - Those in power may use their status to groom or exploit others sexually, then silence survivors through blame, shaming, Non-Disclosure Agreements, or excommunication. The institution’s reputation is protected at all costs, while victims are re-traumatised or driven out.

• Barriers to Leaving - Leaving is framed as rebellion, spiritual deception, or eternal damnation which often results in shunning, slander, or loss of community and family. These high emotional and relational costs keep many trapped long after they question the belief system.

What we see in the counselling room:

Clinically we see anxiety, depression, eating disorders, burnout, hypervigilance, very low self-esteem, suicidality, sexual dysfunction, relational challenges, obsessive compulsive disorder and deep grief. 

We see post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and complex post-traumatic stress disorder,  (C-PTSD) which can present as sleep disturbances, intrusive thoughts and flashbacks, rumination, dissociation, somatic symptoms such as chronic headaches and fatigue, self-harming, substance misuse, difficulties concentrating and emotional dysregulation.

It can be extremely difficult for people to learn to trust themselves again and shame and guilt are pervasive when consequences for actions are often extreme, either now or in the afterlife. People live with social isolation, regret, feel betrayed and confused and wonder how they could have been so deceived by these groups.

We see people trying to rebuild their sense of self and live with the consequences of being excommunicated from the group or shunned by family and friends for leaving or challenging beliefs. The impact of these can be devastating. 

Reintegration into life outside the group can be extremely difficult and often people struggle with everyday skills, like how to make friends, sign up to a sports team or know how to manage their finances. When people have only been trained for life within the group, they are often economically dependent on the group. This can make it harder to leave but can also mean they don’t have the skills or understanding needed to apply for an outside job, or function within environments that are diverse and use critical thinking to problem solve for example. They may feel socially awkward, have significant gaps in references to popular culture and feel isolated and lonely when they leave, wondering if they’ve done the right thing. 

The long term nature of recovery and re-construction of identity can severely affect mental health and ongoing anxiety around consequences people have been taught to fear at an existential and everyday level can be debilitating.

The impacts we see in the counselling room are true for people leaving a group that may be understood in the sensational way we might talk about cults, or could be true for those who attend the neighbourhood church on the corner. 

We acknowledge that not all religious groups are coercive and those that are, do not necessarily represent the wider denomination or religion. Healthy faith-based and religious entities will no doubt want to ensure that coercive practices are not present in their movement and be interested in hearing from people for whom these have been harmful. We have seen active reparations from denominations such as the Uniting Church for example.

Recommendations:

We are aware that many of our clients and some of our practitioners with lived experience have made submissions to this inquiry. 

As a Collective, we support the recommendations from the authors of Beyond Belief: Responding to Coercive Cults and High-Control Group who made a joint submission. 

The authors’ recommended framework for Group-based coercive control could be an effective tool in capturing the harm seen in practice and informing the ways in which reform could be possible within legal responses and through survivor-led storytelling and reshaping of our public understanding of this issue.

We also agree that using “cult” and “fringe group” as terms for this experience places the problem as happening somewhere other than the mainstream and as sensational, part of content for a podcast or docuseries for example. It is our strong opinion that were the purview of this inquiry to extend beyond “fringe” communities, it would find prevalent experiences of harmful religious practices within dominant denominations across Victoria.

And, as practitioners working face-to-face with people who have experienced harm, we echo the authors’ recommendations that survivor voices be centred in advisory and training roles and that resources are directed to specialist trauma services and exit pathway strategies. 

In our own spheres of influence with peak bodies such as the Australian Counselling Association (ACA), the Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia (PACFA), the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA), the Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW), the International Coaching Federation (ICF) and others our practitioners are members of, we will continue to raise awareness of the impacts of coercion in faith-based and religious groups and look for avenues and opportunities for training and increased understanding. We look forward to increased Victorian Government support and leadership in this space.

Jane Kennedy, Samantha Sellers and Elise Heerde

The Religious Trauma Collective