You deserve to work with someone who understands the life-altering impact of adverse religious experiences. Not only do I get it, I’ve devoted my professional life to helping survivors resolve their religious trauma.
As a Therapist, I help survivors resolve their religious trauma with body-based therapy and resources.
As a Coach, I empower folks who have been harmed by religion, to clarify their values and learn to trust themselves with trauma-informed coaching and resources.
BODY: Support your body’s innate ability to resolve religious trauma with somatic-based skills and practices.
MIND: Transform your narrative and undermine toxic beliefs with embodied awareness and experiences.
COMBINED: Integrate your newfound safety, vitality, and connection into an embodied life you can love.
In fact, overwhelmed may be the most concise way to describe trauma — an experience that was more than your nervous system could handle at the time.
Religious Trauma is trauma experienced in a religious context or as a result of religious beliefs, practices, or structures.
Religious trauma often results from experiences when you were unable to do what was necessary to defend yourself or to escape to safety.
There’s an unresolved quality to trauma that continues to exist in your body until it’s resolved.
Resolving religious trauma requires more than deconstructing harmful beliefs.
Toxic religious beliefs, practices, and structures result in trauma when your nervous system perceives them as threats and triggers a physiological survival response.
The resulting religious trauma doesn’t exist as thoughts in your mind, it exists as unresolved survival physiology in your nervous system.
This is why resolving religious trauma requires more than deconstructing harmful beliefs.
There’s value in sharing your story, however trauma does not live in your narrative alone.
Within many religious traditions, there’s an emphasis on thoughts, beliefs, and narratives. You get the impression that reality exists within these mental constructs, and your body cannot be trusted as a source of knowledge about the world.
What’s often overlooked is the reality that you live within a body that prioritizes your survival. When it comes to survival, your body doesn’t care about your story, it only wants to be safe.
Religious trauma is more than the story of what happened
Trauma is more than the event(s) you experienced
Religious trauma is the physiological response to events that overwhelmed your nervous system
This is why cognitive approaches to trauma are often ineffective.
You can’t think yourself out of trauma
You can’t talk yourself into feeling safe unless your body feels safe
Your body doesn’t care about logic and reason
Resolving religious trauma requires an embodied approach that honors your body’s need to feel safe. Talk therapy can be helpful once trauma is resolved, particularly when it comes to integrating your new-found safety into a narrative that reflects your post-traumatic growth.
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Here’s to a life you can love!
-Brian Peck, LCSW
