Have you ever had a bad experience at church? If so, you know that it can be hard to talk about. Fifteen years ago, there were even fewer resources available for people who had negative religious experiences. Dr. Laura Anderson was one of the first people to speak out about this issue, and she has helped to create a more supportive community for people who are leaving or questioning their faith.

Anderson started the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery in Nashville in 2021 to provide resources for people who were experiencing religious trauma. Her first book, “When Religion Hurts You: Healing from Religious Trauma and the Impact of High-control Religion,” publishes Oct. 17. She said it’s the resource she wished she had decades ago.

“Whether that is words and conversation, topics to help organize their experiences, or a story that they can maybe relate to a little bit or a lot, I want people to be able to see they’re not the only one and that they didn’t make it up,” Anderson said.

Anderson encourages the reader to view trauma and healing in a new way. An advance copy of the book was provided to Reckon for review. Reckon is not being compensated for this article.

The therapist spoke with Reckon about the book, the importance of including the body in trauma recovery and offers advice for people re-evaluating their worldview.

Reckon: In the book, you talk about redefining what healing looks like. Why is redefining healing so important for trauma recovery?

Anderson: In previous research, healing was described as symptom reduction or post-traumatic growth, which is a therapeutic concept that focuses on what you’ve learned from the traumatic experience. To me, that feels like spiritual bypassing. If the goal is to see how I have grown as a person, which oftentimes does happen as we’re healing from trauma, but it also feels like that mindset bypasses the actual process of healing.

When we open up to healing as an ongoing process, it does take away the end goal, which sometimes can be really frustrating and maybe even overwhelming to think about.  Often, we have an idea of what healing will look like. People will say “when I’m healed or when I’m done doing this work, my life is going to look this specific way.” Those goals do give us motivation to work towards that end, so taking that away can feel really daunting.

This opens up the door to see that healing actually can happen in many different moments. And if we’re only going towards this very specific end goal, we oftentimes miss everything that’s happening in our day to day.

When we talk about healing as an ongoing process, it actually allows for us to live in the healing, like in the present moment, rather than just looking at it as this like future experience that we’re trying to get to, and then life will start.

Reckon: In the book, you address the issue of creeping Fundamentalism, which happens when people leave one form of fundamentalism and simply adopt a different one after leaving their old worldview. How are you seeing fundamentalism persist in the deconstruction community?

Anderson: On social media, I started noticing how people were hopping from these very high control religions into other highly-controlled spaces. For example, some people who had deconstructed would only follow very specific people in the deconstruction community or had to vote in very specific ways or speak in very specific ways about social justice causes or, posting in certain ways so that they were considered a safe person in the community. In many of the people in the deconstruction space, some of the loudest voices were being extremely prescriptive and telling people they were not a safe person if they did this or that.

I just started seeing that across the board not just in deconstruction spaces–it’s in other spaces as well. But I think this fundamentalism and these sets of rules really play on this need or this desire for human certainty. As much as we say, we don’t want to be controlled, our nervous systems thrive on this sense of certainty. This is good or bad, right or wrong. Um, I, you know, black or white and I don’t mean like people.

This binary thinking tells us if I know what is good or right, then that means that I’m safe and I’m accepted. I’m connected. I’m okay. As humans, we gravitate towards these very prescriptive living groups that are telling us what to do, who to listen to, who to not listen to, what to say. It really is just as fundamentalist, maybe just with a different cause behind it, as high-control religion.

Reckon: What does it mean for you to be able to see your experience reflected not only in this data, but also in your clients and people around the world?

Anderson: It’s pretty wild. My book launch team has people from all over the world on staff. We’ve been meeting and discussing a few chapters of the book each week leading up to the launch. I certainly don’t expect that everybody will like my book. I am not for everybody, and that’s okay. It has been nothing short of overwhelming in a good way to hear the team’s feedback. People have said things like, ‘I wish I would have had this 30 years ago’ and ‘this is going to be so helpful because it actually puts words around people’s experiences.’

It’s incredible to know that the book can be a source of encouragement for so many people. In my own deconstruction process, I started this years and years ago before social media was really a thing. For a long time, I really thought I was the only person going through this. I don’t say that in an arrogant way. I think the 2016 election happened and that’s where people started to be more vocal on social media. I had already been deconstructing for almost 10 years at that point, but it opened up this other level of healing that I didn’t even know I needed.

I also realized that my experience was common, and I think even more common than I thought it was. My hope is that other people will be able to experience something similar. Knowing that they’re not alone doesn’t take away the trauma. But when you don’t have to carry the shame of feeling like you’re the only one who doesn’t fit in, it opens up so much space not only for self-compassion, but also space to heal. Then, at the very least, you’re not fighting against yourself.

Reckon: You discuss a lot of body-based therapies and neuroscience in the book. Why is the body so important to you when you talk about trauma and trauma recovery?

Anderson: The very simple answer is that having a clear understanding of the body and trauma lays down a foundation for everything else in the book. I felt strongly that we need a proper understanding of what is trauma and what is abuse.

There’s a lot of people who say religious trauma is a unique kind of trauma, but I disagree. I don’t think it is. I believe religious trauma fits under the umbrella of complex trauma. One of the things that I really believe as a clinician, is that when we’re working with complex trauma, we have to take a bi-directional approach. We need to have modalities of treatment that we use that are top down, meaning that they are very cognitive in nature. We also need to use modalities that are bottom up, which is body in nature.

It’s important for people to cognitively understand what happened to them, but it’s maybe more important for them to resolve it in my body. Addressing complex trauma is a complex process because it’s a complex thing that happened to you or you grew up in a complex environment like a high-control religion.

Reckon: What’s the difference between Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Complex Post-Trauma Stress Disorder?

Anderson: The easiest way to describe these two conditions is actually by using a different term. I do talk about this a bit in the book. I like to talk about it in terms of a single incident trauma, or we could also call it a shock trauma. Versus, a complex trauma. Oftentimes, PTSD is going to be the result of the shock or single incident trauma. One of the defining elements of PTSD is that there was a before, then this thing happened, and then there was the after. With single-incident trauma, we can point to an event and identify when life was changed.

With complex trauma, oftentimes there is no before. It’s just always been this way. There are consistent and persistent threats, overwhelm that is inescapable. This mindset becomes your normal way of living and you are constantly in a state of hypervigilance or one of the four trauma responses of fight, flight, freeze or fawn.

There may not be a specific moment that you can look back to and point out a specific moment. Instead, with complex trauma, it was like every moment of your life. It was constant. Treatment then looks a little bit different between PTSD and C PTSD, because with PTSD we can address a specific moment where things changed.

Reckon: What advice to have for people who are either re-evaluating their belief systems or addressing the trauma they suffered after having adverse religious experiences?

Anderson: If you’re a survivor of complex trauma, you may have to use these coping skills for the rest of your life, but your trauma doesn’t have to be the thing that defines you. You don’t have to be in therapy for the rest of your life. You don’t have to always be down in the dumps and processing things.

This is why I think it’s important to think of healing as an ongoing process. In every moment of the day, I could be leaning into that healing because especially with complex trauma, there may never be an end point to these tools. But if we view healing as ongoing, then that makes healing a little bit more accessible.

It’s not always going to be this way. It’s not always going to be this hard.  I think that that’s something we have to remember.

The goal of healing is to actually live. We shouldn’t miss that because healing doesn’t have to be this grueling process. It can be a really lighthearted thing. All yourself the permission to celebrate every time that you are aware of what’s happening when you’re triggered. That is such a big deal, and it’s not something that most of us had access to in religion. It’s really important to not miss those moments.”

“When Religion Hurts You” is available for pre-order on lauraeanderson.com or Amazon.